JayB

A few months ago our cat fell off of our roof, which is probably ~40 feet high, and dislocated his elbow. We took him to the vet, where they reset the elbow for ~$800. I asked the vet if it was okay to let him out of the carrier, and he said "Sure - just maybe put him in a small area, like a bathroom, where he won't be tempted to run around a lot." I leave him in the bathroom with a towel to lay on and head back to work for a bit, and figure he'll be fine since my wife will be back in half an hour. I get back about an hour later, and my wife is holding the cat in her lap in the kitchen. His fur is matted, his eyes are narrowed, and he just doesn't look right. I first think he may have had a seizure or something, but what actually happened is he wigged out in a massive way trying to get his cast off. He ripped all of his back claws off, tracked the resulting blood all over the bathroom (like as in streaks up to 3 feet high on the walls, and the smell of blood was palpable before you even got into the room), and managed to re-dislocate his elbow in the process. We were pondering what to do, since this is an incredibly cantankerous cat that goes berserk if there's anything on his body that he doesn't want there. He once managed to shuck the cone-thingy and rip out a stitched-in catheter with his teeth. We concluded that even if we spent the two-grand on the surgery, the likelihood that he'd tolerate the cast on his leg for long enough for things to heal was nil, and we decided we'd see how he did without the operation. If it looked as though he was in pain or poor spirits, we'd reconsider. He's slighyly gimpy, but gets around fine, doesn't seem to be in any pain can still use the leg to walk, run, and bat things around with. We just don't let him out on the roof anymore. If it was a choice between spending the $2K or putting him down, we'd have spent the money.

The Danes need Prole there to inform them that freedom of speech is nothing more than a value-laden western construct formulated by the capitalist elite for the purposes of justifying their class-rule and deceiving workers into accepting a finite subset of "freedoms" defined for them by the said elite instead of demanding and forcibly seizing their rightful share of the social product.....

This is my guess as well. I think Edwards has a lot riding on any endorsement he may make. "In 1985, a 31-year-old North Carolina lawyer named John Edwards stood before a jury and channeled the words of an unborn baby girl. Referring to an hour-by-hour record of a fetal heartbeat monitor, Mr. Edwards told the jury: "She said at 3, `I'm fine.' She said at 4, `I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing O.K.' Five, she said, `I'm having problems.' At 5:30, she said, `I need out.' " But the obstetrician, he argued in an artful blend of science and passion, failed to heed the call. By waiting 90 more minutes to perform a breech delivery, rather than immediately performing a Caesarean section, Mr. Edwards said, the doctor permanently damaged the girl's brain. "She speaks to you through me," the lawyer went on in his closing argument. "And I have to tell you right now — I didn't plan to talk about this — right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you." The jury came back with a $6.5 million verdict in the cerebral palsy case, and Mr. Edwards established his reputation as the state's most feared plaintiff's lawyer. In the decade that followed, Mr. Edwards filed at least 20 similar lawsuits against doctors and hospitals in deliveries gone wrong, winning verdicts and settlements of more than $60 million, typically keeping about a third. As a politician he has spoken of these lawsuits with pride. "I was more than just their lawyer," Mr. Edwards said of his clients in a recent essay in Newsweek. "I cared about them. Their cause was my cause." The effect of his work has reached beyond those cases, and beyond his own income. Other lawyers have filed countless similar cases; just this week, a jury on Long Island returned a $112 million award. And doctors have responded by changing the way they deliver babies, often seeing a relatively minor anomaly on a fetal heart monitor as justification for an immediate Caesarean. On the other side, insurance companies, business groups that support what they call tort reform and conservative commentators have accused Mr. Edwards of relying on questionable science in his trial work. Indeed, there is a growing medical debate over whether the changes have done more harm than good. Studies have found that the electronic fetal monitors now widely used during delivery often incorrectly signal distress, prompting many needless Caesarean deliveries, which carry the risks of major surgery. The rise in such deliveries, to about 26 percent today from 6 percent in 1970, has failed to decrease the rate of cerebral palsy, scientists say. Studies indicate that in most cases, the disorder is caused by fetal brain injury long before labor begins. An examination of Mr. Edwards's legal career also opens a window onto the world of personal injury litigation. In building his career, Mr. Edwards underbid other lawyers to win promising clients, sifted through several dozen expert witnesses to find one who would attest to his claims, and opposed state legislation that would have helped all families with brain-damaged children and not just those few who win big malpractice awards." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/politics/campaign/31EDWA.html?ex=1203224400&en=ec51e69ecd2f506f&ei=5070

I think that you are definitely right, and your perspective as a first hand observer is authoritative IMO. I'm just saying that in the same way that someone who sees a male cross dresser from a couple blocks away will tell you they are looking at a woman, even if they'd come to a different conclusion from a few feet away...most parties are probably going to look across from the parking lot, perceive an unacceptable objective hazard, and climb something else. It also sounds like the pitches down low are stiff enough to act as a fairly stout filter that might weed out a lot of folks who would otherwise find the route appealing.

Thanks for the first-hand perspective. Given that there are plenty of wild, untrammeled, beautiful places that require good fitness and solid all-around mountain skills that don't give the appearance of being threatened by serac-fall at all, or at least less extensively, my sense is that your achievement will not be duplicated by another party any time soon. It's certainly one of the more dramatic and imposing lines anyone's established in the Cascades in the past few years, IMO. Link to original TR to save interested parties some searching. http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/494632/fpart/1

I'm just happy that the youth of today are *finally* standing up for something and engaging in displays of spirited public activism such as this...

If we reach a state of affairs where that's the primary inspiration for shouting out"Allahu Akbar" then well be well on our way to licking the terror problem...

Just think if some of that zeal were transferred into ice-hockey. If you heard "Allahu Akbar..." from behind you you'd know there was a wicked body check on the way...

Can't believe that this thread title has been up for this long without someone posting a photo of a plastic, made-in-China Jesus chotcke or Elvis-style velvet painting of HeyZeus...

Why choose when we can have the best of both worlds... http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/06/terror/main1685808.shtml Fill up your car to pay for the oil...that funds the perma-welfare that fosters the segregation from and contempt for the society around them...instead of being forced to go out and mingle with the infidel whores to make a living and temper the seclusion and fanaticism a bit... Worked like a charm in Europe (sans the money to pay for the perma-welfare). Too bad that Canadians lack the ethnolinguistic chauvinism to get the full-tilt mass-alienation going Banlieu style...

Howjda guess? sobo never gets any. It's a fucking way of life. How do like that irony? A "fucking" way of life not getting laid. Yeah, what a great fucking life. ahh, marriage I ain't gonna change it now, cuz I've got mouths to feed. But I tell ya this: If I knew then what I know now, I never would've taken the plunge. Milk tastes better when you don't own the cow. Just don't let us find out that you are planning to chronicle your tale in a tell all marketed to housewives in England, complete with a photo to accompany the teaser-profile in the tabloid(!)....

I'm thinking of hedging in pesos to protect my savings...

There will be no shortage of money losing enterprises in the news in the next year. I encourage Prole to find one of them and give them all of his money, or better yet, he can author an agreement to have the government transfer all of his earnings to them to keep them in business indefinitely. Follow this one simple step, and your prosperity will be assured.

I thought it was buying leveraged portfolios of securitized neg-am, I/O, pay-option, 2/28 No-Doc ARMs issued on hundreds fraudulently appraised investor-owned properties in the Sacremento suburbs... http://flippersintrouble.blogspot.com/ Or maybe that was Merrill, Citibank, etc...

Reverse optimization of the asset allocation problem. Perfection. Whoa! Stop the presses again. Are you telling me that the business and ruling classes will attempt to preserve their wealth during periods of economic crisis and use state power to do so? Like, OMFG. And workers will support it to keep their jobs? Huh, I guess no one's willing to commit social suicide for the free-market utopian jihad except the economists. Oh wait... The assumption that all businesses, wealthy people, etc have a common interest in a unitary policy approach is quite amusing. As is the notion that unprofitable enterprises going out of business is an unequivocally bad thing. The fact that your personal economic ideal lacks an efficient mechanism for doing so, along with an effective mechanism for allocating resources, coordinating supply and demand constitute some of the principal reasons why societies with economies based on your model did so well in the twentieth century.

This honestly isn't an attack, but I am curious about how you process Deuteronomy, Revelations, etc.

It would appear that in this case, two equivalents of Grignard reagent will add across the carbonyl bond. Thus, either A or E might be the answer. The only question being, whether the oxygen resulting from the opening up of the lactone ester bond is methylated or not. I have to think about this some more. Cool. My first guess was A. Figured the CH3 would wage a nucleophillic attack the carbonyl group and make something that looked like A, but it's been ~14 years since Ochem, so it's all going fuzzy and something tells me I'd get about 25% of the answers right on a multiple choice test with four potential answers for each question...

expecting different results from the same process? The task for this group is to find ways to incorporate the genius that this policy embodies into mountaineering. 1. If you suspect that you are on the verge of getting lost, forcibly transfer the map and compass to the guy who has shown the least capacity to use them.... Ther

Reverse optimization of the asset allocation problem. Perfection.

Insanity.

Perfectly well- in so many words I stated that human nature is the desire and control of everything. That is what the human ego wants, craves. Over centuries, most cultures have begun to develop more tolerant attitudes that curb this desire into more passive/aggressive manners of pursuing that gratification, of hiding it's true aims. The difference is that Islamic culture is centuries behind and is still steeped in openly aggressive, angry, violent action to simply take what you want. It's very childish indeed but the danger of it in adult minds has been demonstrated. And the fact that, as you pointed out, terrorist attacks are not limited to being against Americans and American interests, indicates that this isn't just the US vs. Islam. The ego of the Islamist wants everything, right now, therefore everyone is expendable. The thing is, it's no different with any other humans except that societal influences in most other cultures have directed this impulse into less violent means. On relative terms, maybe so. If you were a teenager in Iraq, what's the likelihood you would see Americans as invaders and occupiers? If you were an American colonist, what's the likelihood you would see the British as oppressors? If you were an English nobleman in the 1700's what's the likelihood you'd see the American colonists as rebellious, traitorous scum? It's called relativity. Your status as an American today makes it seem unthinkable that the American colonists were in the wrong. I'm not suggesting they are or aren't, just that one's perceptions are relative. So what about Islam? I personally think the tenets of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine, and much of the culture that is results from it, is reprehensible and completely unacceptable and ill suited to the formation of a peaceful society. But even the most moderate person brought up in Islamic society would have a view of it that is comparatively relative. You keep bringing up "moral equivalence". Well, most Christians as well as Islamists would condemn one for having out of wedlock sex. I don't think there is anything wrong with it at all, in fact I think religious repression of sexuality is one of the strangest and most neurotic parts of organized religion. Everyone, myself included, is convinced their morality on this issue is, well, the most "moral". So which one is righteous? You cannot answer this without consulting your own prejudices. Unless you've picked sides according to your prejudices, how much difference is there exactly? My hypothetical observers would surely see thousands of German citizens who were powerless (individually if not collectively) to stop Hitler's policies being incinerated by American bombs. America was in the right- but only within the paradigm of humanity's inability to advance beyond their ill manners of relationship and lack of understanding of their own egos and minds- manipulation, possession, acquisition, oppression- that breed such conflicts in the first place. We clearly aren't advanced enough to have done anything differently, but this resistance to even discussing these flaws- aided interminably by our mindless identification with nationalism, patriotism, and- surprise!- our religions, and helped further along by manipulative people in power who seek even greater power, certainly helps perpetuate our stumbling from one conflict to another. Obviously not. But would it be any different if they manifested those grievances by becoming politically active in their country and working to incite a nationalist war against the US someday, using patriotism to whip their citizens into an anti-US frenzy? Are bombs with a country's name on them being dropped on the US 'morally equivalent' to an Islamic woman with a name and address detonating herself on the Space Mountain roller coaster? Is it this "personal touch" that disturbs people so much? I appreciate the thoughtful responses. I'm familiar with moral relativism, and accept that people's circumstances condition their perspective to a large extent. Accepting that this is true doesn't mean that I have to concede that the particular framework through which any particular actor perceives a particular event is by default - by the fact of its very existence - either as moral or as legitimate as any other perspective held by any other observer. Geoffrey Dahmer may not have been capable of making a moral distinction between his actions and those of the Donner Party, but that doesn't render the distinction between eating the flesh of the dead in order to survive, and murder to gratify a perversion any less real or absolute. The fact that both George Washington and Osama bin Laden employed violent means in an effort to secure certain political ends doesn't render the distinctions between the types of violence they employed, their targets, or their ends any less meaningful or absolute. That's all. As far as the War of Independence is concerned, I am actually quite sympathetic to the English case. I do think it was reasonable to tax the colonies in order to support the expenses associated with defending the border, that the English colonial rule in the colonies was both generous and lax by the standards of the time, and that on the whole the British troops acted with an admirable degree of civility and restraint throughout the conflict. One can look at both Canada and Australia and see quite clearly that a continuation of British rule would have hardly been detrimental to the rights or liberties of the subjects, and may well have brought about the end of slavery in the US in 1834 instead of 1863, and prevented the civil war or anything like it from occurring. Having said all of that, pretending that either the means employed by the colonists or the ends that they were persuing render them the moral equivalents of the contemporary jihadists is indefensible in any sane or rational moral framework. ................................................................. 5d7Ms48DQX0

One could also consider the cases of Japan and Germany, both in terms of the tactics used to win the conflicts, and in terms of the presence of an occupying force for years after the conflict, and permanent bases....

I disagree with this simply because I don't see this happening. I see a lot of people blaming themselves for inciting what is being brought down on our heads. You don't see it? What's happening is both one and the other- either one blames Islam entirely for the conflict, or blames America and wallows in self loathing. Both are short sighted and not seeing the bigger picture. Do you suppose if some intelligent alien without bias or knowledge of human history came to Earth and observed the goings on, they would intuitively see a peace loving USA being mercilessly attacked by a group of savage, foreign invaders who adhere to a intolerant, violently oppressive and psychotic religious doctrine? Or might they see the world's richest and most powerful country, one which enjoys the sole privelege of maintaining standing armies and bases in foreign countries all over the world, one which uses it's economic might to dictate if not coerce many countries into operating in particular ways favorable to it, one which- forcibly or not- also exerts overt cultural influence upon most other cultures, being attacked by a group of savage, foreign invaders who adhere to a intolerant, violently oppressive and psychotic religious doctrine? Viewed that way, one might conclude that the nature of humans is violent conflict and a perpetual need to control everything and everyone around them. The fact that one culture happens to have particular aspects that are more modern and enlightened and tolerant and compassionate is all relative, since that same culture also happens to currently have all the power and control. This country was founded by people who rebelled against an occupying government and a culture from which they wanted separation- in other words, it came about through an insurgency that required what today's pundits if placed in 1700's England would deem "terrorism". Focusing on fragmented details ignores the examination of humanity as a whole. Since most have no patience for an objective examination of humanity, the most common reaction then is to say "that's human nature, can't change it". At which point one gives up and resigns that nothing can be changed, therefore, one chooses sides in the conflict according to one's prejudice and soldiers on, ensuring a continuation of the status quo. Which leads us back to my original point- it's all their fault! 1. How well does this address terrorist attacks that aren't directed against the US? 2. Is there a direct equivalence between the violence employed by the American colonists and modern jihadists to advance their particular ends? 3. Are all ends furthered by violent means morally equivalent to one another? Both the allies and the Germans used mass-bombings of civilian population centers as part of the tactics that they employed in an effort to secure victory? Did that render the Allies and the Axis powers morally equivalent to one another, and the outcome a matter of indifference? Would your hypothetical observers look at the two sides, see them bombing each others cities, and conclude that any moral distinctions between the two sides were rendered mute by the use of equally horrible tactics? 4. People from all over the world are affected by American power. Are all people from all cultures equally likely to manifest their grievances by plotting to detonate themselves in midtown Manhattan or Disneyland?

1. Only part of the discussion at hand has been concerned with suicide bombings. Are poverty and desperation behind honor killings, forced marriage, etc? 2. If we transition from the general and abstract to the real and concrete and look at who is actually engaging in what, how well does the notion that all people of all cultures who encounter a particular set of hardships are equally likely to respond with suicide bombings - irrespective of their religion or culture? And how true is it that those who do engage in this act have necessarily been driven to do so by either material hardships or extremes of political repression that have no analogue anywhere else in the globe or throughout history? Does the intensity and distribution of suicide violence correlate perfectly with either poverty or repression? If not - how do you explain this? How well does the existence of suicide terrorists who were neither poor, nor uneducated, nor subject to political repression fit into this scheme? How tough are things for the immigrants in Denmark who were plotting to murder the cartoonist compared to, say, the hundreds of thousands of desperately poor, HIV-infected people living in a Sowetto slum? I'm willing to concede that as repression and deprivation increase, so does desperation - and a certain amount of violence grows out of that. It's not the Brazilian street-kids or Haitan boat-people that are detonating themselves in discos, though, is it? Why do you think this is the case?

Translation: "If you criticize me or my positions, then you are by default a racist/sexist/etc/etc/etc/etc-ist and you can't sincerely count yourself as a supporter of cause X, Y, or Z unless you agree with me on both the ends and the means." Or.. "You say that you are *against* forced marriages and genital mutilation, but you were *opposed* to strict title-9 parity in collegiate athletics..." Righto.