slothrop

The obvious gully on the NW shoulder of Guye Peak was in decent shape this past Sunday. Three steps of thick-enough ice with heinous wallowing (even w/snowshoes!) above and below. Bring shorter screws and a baby angle. There are a couple small pillars on the left gully wall, too. You might still be able to use our tracks Nice pillar at the end of the technical part The obvious gully

I've got one and mostly have used it as a day pack for hiking, biking, and going to the gym, all without the gear sling. You can clip the top and bottom straps together to make straps that are comfortable enough for the weight you can carry in it.

If she's that underqualified, this just has to be a ploy to paint the Democrats as obstructionists when they rightly refuse to let her nomination pass.

Pasta + bay shrimp (the little bitty ones, precooked) + bottle of four-cheese or alfredo sauce + garlic. Yum. Add mushrooms if you're feeling all gourmet 'n stuff. Veggie pasta is good, since you can cook up a big mess of sauce and not have to worry about your veggies going bad. Fry up some onion, zucchini, eggplant, mushrooms, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, red pepper flakes, and garlic in olive oil, then dump in a big can of tomatoes. Add some Italian sausage or chopped up horsecock to the fry pan (before you add the tomato), if you like.

Jim, it doesn't matter that reality says Americans are undertaxed, it matters that they FEEL they're overtaxed.

Could it be that the wealthiest 1% paid proportionally more because their incomes also greatly increased at the same time that the taxes for them and for those slightly less wealthy went down? Just speculating, but say: Before: - top 1% pays 40 billion on 400 billion of income (10% avg. rate, 40% of total paid) - top 5% pays 60 billion on 700 billion of income (8.5% avg. rate) - everyone pays 100 billion on 2,000 billion After: - top 1% pays 50 million on 600 billion (8.3% rate, 45% of total paid) - top 5% pays 65 million on 850 billion (7.6% rate) - everyone pays 110 million on 2,200 billion In this scenario, the richest got third summer homes, while the merely rich merely got spinning rims for their Escalades. They paid less tax per dollar, but made so many more dollars than last year that their tax bill went up. The money they made didn't just materialize out of thin air, it was redistributed to them from the poorer people

Now there's some social engineering that's right-wing approved! Word. Bring back BIG GOVERNMENT PUBLIC WORKS. Might help repair the laughable infrastructure around here.

You are making absolutely no sense. The "decline of Western Civilization" you're talking about here (what a tired piece of demagoguery that is!) would seem to indicate that crime should be on the rise... but as the DOJ graphs a while back showed, it's down. You can't just rely on raw numbers to indicate economic well-being. You could spend your whole life coming up with a formula for Happiness, but you'd be wrong. So the easiest approximation is H = "How are you doing?". You know, asking someone about their feelings. KK, you seem to think that people are incapable of reporting accurately on their own reality, that feelings != reality. This may work for you, tough guy, but for my girlfriend, for example, feelings == reality. You can't just tell someone to STFU and be happy with their Wal-Mart and their expensive health insurance. Well, you can, but you'd be an asshole. I prefer not to have assholes deciding economic policy. Oh, and "left-wing social engineers"? How is engineering your values ("tell them what they need to hear") any different than engineering anyone else's values? Give up the high horse.

You can always count on me to kill threads with a long-winded reply that takes JayB or Peter Puget seriously.

Does it really matter how much money is made per worker in a family, or whether they're full-time or not? I don't think so. A family is the smallest unit for which measuring income makes sense. Measuring in real dollars makes sense, of course, but once you start "normalizing" for social changes (health care as compensation), it gets complicated. You'd have to adjust for the changing numbers of children per household, for instance, and soon your data are normalized to irrelevance. I mean, the number of children a family has also depends on income... and so on. Whether huge income disparity is a problem doesn't seem very debatable to me. Jealousy is a powerful human emotion, with far-reaching effects not easily quantified. It doesn't much matter to people whether they make more money every year if everyone else is making even more still. For example, people living in the US, with a TV in every room, two cars, a house, and food on the table every day still manage to complain that they are poor, yet their material means are hugely greater than most people in the world. The only comparisons people take seriously are those they can make based on what they see with their own eyes. Well, you can venture all you want, but where's your data? The NY Times ran a feature a while back on this very issue, income mobility. In general, people in the lower 3/5 were more likely than not to stay where they were or move down. People in the upper 2/5 were only barely more likely than not to stay put or move up. It was hardest to move up from middle class to upper-middle class (only 37.5% did so after 10 years). http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html

Blew away in the hurricane.

Whoa, look at the plastic man they want to replace DeLay with: There really are Texas liberal freaks; they all live in Austin. You know, "Keep Austin Weird" bumper stickers 'n all that.

Bye-bye, asshole!

You can rap with one rope. Even though Ingalls is a popular peak, bringing rappel slings, or being prepared to leave some of the slings you brought for pro, is standard alpine practice. I remember there being bolted belay stations every half-ropelength on the South Face, so setting up rappels with your own gear would be much easier than usual.

Hey, I think he's asking about Mt. Shukstan. Quit kidding around, you guys.

What her motivations are is entirely beside the point. But it's what The Man wants you to keep talking about.

Don't you play video games, chirp? Maybe you should hush up about "wasting time and money"?

Asparagine? So I should stop eating asparagus fries?

Well, if Bush hadn't promised a manned mission to Mars, the Martians wouldn't have gotten scared and started heating their atmosphere to an uncomfortable temperature to keep the humans away. Duh.

Katrina did shut down many refineries, which is why gas prices (and not oil prices) went up. There more than a little political opportunism in calling for price gouging investigations... though I'm sure that it's going on. I remember hearing about $6 gas in Atlanta. If we repeal the gas tax, then the hurricane (and the terrorists) have won.

That's not really fair, is it? I mean, I am just as outraged as you that Seattle can't build a F*&$! public transit system, but Americans know how to plan for the long term just fine. Those Americans just don't get elected. Not since the 1960s, at the latest. Europe also has much higher gas taxes! Raise the gas tax and build something useful, dammit.

I almost hit a tree laying across the road between Darrington and Hwy 20. Brakes work.

Fuck this fucking town.

Oh, enough of the semantics already. You are a beautiful and unique snowflake, OK?

Pink Floyd. Animals. I heard what sounded like a Neil Young song on KEXP the other night and it was so bad I had to change the station. I'm usually the model of tolerance and curiosity, but this was for me to poop on. How many of his songs sound exactly the same, anyway? And why are his lyrics so inane sometimes? Too much rhyming is for bad poetry. Tell me it was the drugs.