JayB

Yes, keep dodging the point, restated here for your benefit: Making wild accusations and conjectures about public figures that you don't care for is one thing, holding the government to account with fair and intelligent scrutiny is another..." The simple fact is that its not the simple act of criticizing or questioning the government in an act of "Dissent," that determines whether or not those actions are patriotic. The motives that inspire those actions are what matters when making this determination.

"Are you a member of the Verendra7/Jmckay fantasy club too? I hear its very exclusive." Shhh....don't interrupt him. He's in the middle of negotiations with representatives that the Skull and Bones Society, the Saudi Royal Court, and the Freemasons have sent to buy his silence. Or perhaps he's busy composing a monograph lauding the inspired patriotism of the survivalist wingnuts who had the courage to ask the questions about whether or not Bill Clinton was conspiring with the U.N. and the Zionist Occupation Government in their plot to impose libertine homoatheosecularism on their children via the shock troops deployed in the black helicopters.

Oh yeah, drinking Coca Cola, selling arms and weapons to the Saudis, funding Bin Laden to fight the Soveits - its all the same. They're rich - they have ties to everything. Bury your head in the sand and ignore it - you'll feel much better. JB, I never alleged that Bush brought down the towers. That may or may not be true - but I think there are much larger questions of whether and how the Bush family's business dealings have impacted our national security interests and whether they have used their political positions to financially benefit themselves and their friends to the detriment of those security interests. But the Bin Ladens probably eat pop rocks too, so I'll just tune back into infomercials for the ginsu knive knowing you're on the muthafucka. Your seem to think that your allegations are actually more fully substantiated and more consequential than the pop-rocks example, but your essential claim is no more well established. Take a fact, make an allegation, and then engage in some far-ranging speculation. Same model, different specifics. This "Until someone can prove otherwise, I believe X" model of thinking is a hallmark of the paranoid and the deluded, and your last post should be included in the revised-and-updated edition of Hofstatder's tome. "Until you can prove to me that the toaster in my kitchen DIDN'T come alive and try to molest me last night, you've got no right to question this claim. There is a toaster in my kitchen. I was in my house last night. These are facts...." Sorry - but the passion and commitment behind your claims is not the least bit consistent with the either the magnitude of the evidence nor the power - cough - of the arguments that you've brought to bear to support them, so don't be surprised if folks beyond the ideological ramparts are not persuaded by either. JB, what allegations and what passion and commitment? I have posed a couple of questions - I offered no answers and I set forth no hypotheses or speculation and certainly not an argument. You dogmatic fascination with labeling people paranoid/ideological/deluded and generally intellectucally inferior to yourself is seriously clouding your basic reading comprehension skills amigo. Dissent is partiotic - we ought to look skeptically upon our leaders when their business deals overlap with their political roles as public servants. You can label people, call them names, belittle them and generally be an elitist ass towards them with your fancy prose and acadmic theories, but our leaders should answer the questions instead of hiding behind a wall of elitism and privilege. The American public is tired of being ridiculed for posing perfectly good questions - witness the last election. This calls to mind the same essay from which the oft-misunderstood "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." tidbit was taken. Here's another section: "Some claim a place in the list of patriots, by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king, yet not love hius country. He that has been refused a reasonable, or unreasonable request, who thinks his merit underrated, and sees his influence declining, begins soon to talk of natural equality, the absurdity of "many made for one," the original compact, the foundation of authority, and the majesty of the people. As his political melancholy increases, he tells, and, perhaps, dreams, of the advances of the prerogative, and the dangers of arbitrary power; yet his design, in all his declamation, is not to benefit his country, but to gratify his malice. These, however, are the most honest of the opponents of government; their patriotism is a species of disease; and they feel some part of what they express. But the greater, far the greater number of those who rave and rail, and inquire and accuse, neither suspect nor fear, nor care for the publick; but hope to force their way to riches, by virulence and invective, and are vehement and clamorous, only that they may be sooner hired to be silent. A man sometimes starts up a patriot, only by disseminating discontent, and propagating reports of secret influence, of dangerous counsels, of violated rights, and encroaching usurpation. This practice is no certain note of patriotism. To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. Few errours and few faults of government, can justify an appeal to the rabble; who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion. The fallaciousness of this note of patriotism is particularly apparent, when the clamour continues after the evil is past." Making wild accusations and conjectures about public figures that you don't care for is one thing, holding the government to account with fair and intelligent scrutiny is another, amigo.

Oh yeah, drinking Coca Cola, selling arms and weapons to the Saudis, funding Bin Laden to fight the Soveits - its all the same. They're rich - they have ties to everything. Bury your head in the sand and ignore it - you'll feel much better. JB, I never alleged that Bush brought down the towers. That may or may not be true - but I think there are much larger questions of whether and how the Bush family's business dealings have impacted our national security interests and whether they have used their political positions to financially benefit themselves and their friends to the detriment of those security interests. But the Bin Ladens probably eat pop rocks too, so I'll just tune back into infomercials for the ginsu knive knowing you're on the muthafucka. Your seem to think that your allegations are actually more fully substantiated and more consequential than the pop-rocks example, but your essential claim is no more well established. Take a fact, make an allegation, and then engage in some far-ranging speculation. Same model, different specifics. This "Until someone can prove otherwise, I believe X" model of thinking is a hallmark of the paranoid and the deluded, and your last post should be included in the revised-and-updated edition of Hofstatder's tome. "Until you can prove to me that the toaster in my kitchen DIDN'T come alive and try to molest me last night, you've got no right to question this claim. There is a toaster in my kitchen. I was in my house last night. These are facts...." Sorry - but the passion and commitment behind your claims is not the least bit consistent with the either the magnitude of the evidence nor the power - cough - of the arguments that you've brought to bear to support them, so don't be surprised if folks beyond the ideological ramparts are not persuaded by either.

One could make the same arguments about the Roosevelt administration's dealings with Stalin, no? I think that the statement that there are no permanent allies, only permanent interests, is the central principle that actually governs international relations. If you think in terms of interests rather than allies, then some of the inconsistency that you are bemoaning goes away, and the reason why these sorts of unsavory compromises are a fixture of any consequential nation's history becomes evident. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but I don't forsee reality simplifying to the extent that future leaders are spared the necessity of weighing conflicting perogatives or reconciling conflicting interests when trying to determine the best course of action.

There are plenty of factually correct statements in Mein Kampf, but the presence of isolated facts in the text doesn't necessarily validate Hitler's central argument. In the case of the Bin Ladens, they've been the principal contractors for the Saudi Royal family for decades, and amassed a fortune as the result of that relationship. Given the size and scope of the conglomerate that they operate, and the wealth that they've amassed, they probably have stakes in an untold number of corporations, hedge-funds, etc. I'd be astonished if they didn't have equity stakes in every company in the S&P 500. So, the Bin Laden family - of which there are literally hundreds of members by this point - had a stake in the Carlyle Group - ergo...the Bush administration is complicit in a conspiracy to bring down the Twin Towers. I have it on good authority that a member of the Bin Laden family consumed a beverage produced by the Coca Cola company. This is a fact. Ergo the CEO of Coca-Cola might as well have been on the plane with Atta or huddled in a cave with Osama.

It's an audio file. No reading necessary.

So the principal figures in the Bush administration and the ideology that guides their actions are direct lineal descendants of the NAZI party, engaged in a ruthless conspiracy to undermine this country's political foundations and bend the apparatus of the state to enrich themselves and consolidate their power...while simultaneously acting as unwitting stooges for a Zionist conspiracy perpetrated by a cabal of Zionist plants who cleverly concealed both their Jewish origins and their designs to twist US policy to serve Israeli interests behind their...Jewish surnames and ancestry. Exquisite.

Matt: Why don't you type out your Iraq-War oeuvre/dossier? Name names, connect the dots, and cc. me on the e-mail that you send to the relevant sub-committees? I'd be very interested in reading that, in the same way that it would be interesting for me to listen to someone in the throes of a mania interpret ink-blot tests, or to look at the stars with a schizophrenic and watch him transmute the dots into the sky into a prophetic message from the heavens.

"This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment. We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."

"A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it."

When it comes to actual skiing technique - as in the physical motions required to descend a given slope - I'm not sure what BC skiing can do for you with respect to learning that resort skiing in the Northwest can't. Head somewhere like Crystal and Baker and hike for five minutes and you're into the same kind of terrain and variable snowpack that you'd run into in the BC, sans avy-hazard, and get about 30X the vertical in that you'd get in pure BC mode. If your plan is to suck for much longer than necessary, then the pure BC model is proably the best strategy, though.

Wasn't there a party of three that died in the Sandias while simulclimbing? I vaguely remember hearing something about three climbers being found at the base of a cliff with three pieces of gear still attached to the rope. Actually, I can't recall the details of this accident. Might have also been a case of anchor failure.

Did someone steal DFA's password? Seems to me like the DFA of old would be the first to rise in defense of homeopathy and/or any and all assorted karmicoastraltnernative medicinal gobledygook so long as it was accompanied by enough vaguely scientific-sounding terminology and spouted often and loudly enough by self-identified anti-establishment types. I'm going to need some more proof before I believe that this is the real DFA, arisen from the ashes.

I think those fuckers should be castrated and burned alive at the stake. I think she deserves a medal or something. You should at least listen to this story and do a bit more reading before you get the steak-knife and the kindling ready. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6677709

Re: Hofstadter. Same last name, but different guy. I just picked up GEB and am looking forward to reading it once I finish "The Looming Tower."

The things they didn't teach us in engineering school....damn. Apparently your education skipped the discussion of homophones. Yeah - left myself open to that one. I clearly suffer from homophonia. My arguments here are consistent with your own, so I'm not sure why I got hit with the friendly fire. Maybe the irony-potential with the homophone thing was just too great to pass up.

Hahaha. Irony duly noted.

Agreed.

Hey - we're playing the "Let's Confuse Physical and Moral Equivalence Game." I have no problem with the notion of capitol punishment, but don't support the practice simply because there are too many factors that can confound the accurate determination of guilt for me to endorse it. It's amazing to me that anyone would conflate the killing of an unborn child and the execution of an adult who willingly engaged anything that would qualify them for the noose. To argue that one can't be opposed to abortion and in favor of the death penalty is like arguing that anyone who opposes rape should also condemn consensual sex since both acts ultimately involve a man's erect penis penetrating a woman's vagina. Just because two actions share some fundamental physical characteristics with one another, this does not in any way make the two actions morally equivalent. I'm rather amazed that there are people who reach adulthood, much less pass through college, without learning to make such distinctions.

Hey, I guess I'm not the only one that's noticed this trend: "Hofstadter argued that the paranoid style “has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content”. The problem for America's left is not the lack of justified complaints about Mr Bush. It is that their paranoid style—with its propensity to exaggeration and conspiracy-mongering and its inability to distinguish between justified complaints and hysteria—means that their cries are seldom listened to except by people who suffer from the same affliction. Which is sometimes a pity." http://www.economist.com/research/backgrounders/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5359801

Reading through this thread, I couldn't help but be reminded of a tome that I read about a dozen years ago: Selected Quotes: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." "The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind; he has a special technique for seduction."

As long as we're handing out heads-ups, here's one for the morally conflicted mortgage magnate amongst-us. "Fannie Mae has announced that, effective Jan. 30, borrowers must be qualified at "a fully-indexed rate that assumes a fully-amortizing repayment schedule" in order to qualify a loan for purchase by the government-sponsored enterprise." If I were him I'd hoping that the other players in the MBS market have loosened their belts now that Uncle Sugar's lost his appetite for this kind of paper.

A bit Ehrlichian for my tastes, but anyone who reads the economist wins some points in my book.

Liddell by KO late in the second.