JayB

I think that this is the same guy. Someone que theme from "South Park - Bigger, Longer, & Uncut" Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case Sign In to E-Mail This Print Reprints Save By IAN AUSTEN Published: September 19, 2006 OTTAWA, Sept. 18 — A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured. The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria. “I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada,” Justice Dennis R. O’Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference. The report’s findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist. "

"Yeah, and I'd like to hear the Pope say, "Gee, sorry to the millions of women* burned at the stake, treated like second class citizens, and blamed for the fall of man. We didn't really mean any harm..." If you want to go back to the pre-reformation days when assesing the moral standing of various actors in the present, you should also ask the citizens of Greater Scandanavia to collectively apologize for the marauding, raping, and pillaging that they visited on coastal Europe. Sure they'll say they've changed, that was hundreds of years ago, and there's little to nothing left of those tendencies evident in their societies anymore, but I hope you won't let them off the hook with that kind-of half-assed excusemongering. *Where'd you get this number. It's not that I don't think that the Catholic Church has anything to answer for, but this seems just a touch high.

The response from the more vocal and demonstrative adherents of that religion have certainly shown how far off the mark such commentary was. Maybe - more than anything else - they just love irony. I'm just waiting for the day when there's a group of guys massed in the street, all set to chant and burn effigies, when all of a sudden the organizer says "Hey - uh - sorry to dissapoint everyone, but we've consulted the almighty himself and he informed us that actually, unlike the cartoon episode, which seriously pissed him off - this one is just way to trivial to get upset about. He said he'd get back to us if anything came up though, so keep the effigies handy and don't forget those slogans."

Good link for those interested in the dissapearance of the Colorado Glaciers. http://glaciers.pdx.edu/gdb/maps/all.php?page=co_glaciers.html

Hey Rad: If you read through this link: http://www.nichols.edu/departments/glacier/globalwarming.html you'll probably have your answer. Fascinating stuff. After reading through some of the material there, I couldn't help but conclude that the that factors driving glacial retreat are quite a bit more complicated, and have a much longer chronology than most of the folks who have been posting to this thread are aware of.

Come one now Fern. I haven't yet been able to bore a canyon through hundreds of feet of granite by urinating on top of a batholith, but rivers seem to do a pretty good job of it. Pommes and Oranges, eh. I have no idea if CBS is correct or not, but I suspect that if you were to magically transplant a patch of chicken-head laden granite underneath the carbon glacier and then extract it 50 years later, the said chickenheads would be long gone.

0 = Consistently Lowest Prices 100 = Consistently Highest Prices. My hunch is that the prices that you paid were the result of normal seasonal changes in demand, normal tightness in refining capacity with respect to the mandated seasonal blends combined with the abrupt changeover from MBTA to ethanol, higher global demand, and abnormally high geopolitical and atmospheric risk premiums to elevate gas prices this summer. I've never run a gas station, and don't know anyone who has, but I suspect that they price the fuel that they sell based on what they expect to have to pay to refill their tanks, not so much what they paid for the gas that's in them. With oil supplies tight, the ethanol-conversion induced megacluster, super-tight refining capacity (we actually import quite a bit of our gasoline from Europe and elsewhere to meet demand), and everyone bracing for the possible impact of a bad hurricane season in the gulf and supply disruptions originating from within Iran, Venezuela, or elsewshere - I was kind of surprised that prices didn't hit $4 a gallon. Now that demand is abating due to normal seasonal declines and the big political/atmospheric disasters failed to materialize, I'm not surpised that prices are falling off a cliff. Another factor that might be having an impact is people accepting that high fuel prices are more than a momentary blip, and they are making some lifestyle changes to reduce their consumption a bit. Anyhow - if you want the real low-down, I'm sure that our resident Socialist Day Trader (aka fear_and_greed) has been feverishly following the petro-markets while putting together a trading strategy that will help him profit from the inevitable decline and collapse of global capitalism, so maybe he'll chime in if he's already taken his profits.

Yes- actually. Just define your benchmarks. How much of an increase, over what period of time would vindicate your conspiratorial mutterings. Pretty easy to track things here: http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/

I think the reality is that human beings are going to continue to burn fossil fuels until they become so scarce and expensive that there no alternative but to use something else, and that whatever consequences this process will bring about are a foregone conclusion.

Any route that people generally rope-up for that includes a sit-start and/or holds/features that are "off" = a contrived route.

I'm not sure why you thought of me, as the thing that amazes me the most about the public's response to gasoline prices is the fact that people are positively - stunned - when prices increase as supply diminishes relative to demand. Miles driven per-capita increase in the spring, decline in the fall. Happens every year. Toss in some formulation changes that put a minor dent in refineries' ability to deliver fuel that satisfies local regulatory requirements, and you tighten things still further. Happens every year, but the moronosphere reacts with disbelief and outrage, and in the case of the recent price declines, no small number of conspiracy theories. There was also the fact that there was quite a significant geopolitical and climatological risk premium built into this summers prices, not to mention the impact of the massive ethanol-subsidy-cluster/MBTA-phaseout that both the refining industry and the ethanol producers were suprisingly ill-prepared for. The only thing that surprised me was that prices didn't go higher. FWIW every country in the world pays the same price for the same grade of crude, and the gas-price differential simply reflects additional taxes in the case of higher prices, or lower taxes and/or subsidies in the case of lower prices. Anyhow - I am hoping that the same masterminds that have uncovered the great gas-price lowering conspiracy can shed some light on the neocon conspiracy that makes the price of air-conditioning units, shorts, and beach-houses rise in the summer, and the price of warm-coats, lift-tickets, and ski-equipment rise in the winter.

I think I saw something like this somewhere else, but I was curious as to what other traits that people could identify that would fit a big chunk of the climbing public. I figured that this poll would help get things started.

Not sure if I can help with the names, but congratulations and best wishes for a healthy Mom/baby-girl.

Good rec on 13&God.

100 Top Climbing Sites

Hey - thanks for the response. That's great information about stuff that I've been curious about for a while. I'm thinking of some point after the last of the continental glaciers in North America were well and truly gone - so probably in the last 10,000 years or so. Also - is there anything like a "History of North American Glaciers" that summarizes what's gone on from the time when the continental glaciers were retreating to the present? I'm especially interested in what the chronology of glacial advance/retreat looks like in the Colorado Rockies and other continental ranges where the glaciers are long gone. Any idea when the last of the major glaciers in Colorado dissappeared?

Can't keep a Peacock down.

you answered your own question. uggh! spanaway...home of bowling alleys and chevy novas with plenty of bondo. That sounds like a Potemkin Spanaway to me. I'm thinking of cranked/coked out mullets, semi-rural g-funk gangbangers, trailers, strip-malls, vacant lots and pull-outs festooned with the kind of bizzare, totemic trash-heaps composed of shell casings, pampers, couches, and beer cans. Some day these trash-heaps will be like shell-middens for the archaeologists of the future, and I can only imagine the visions that they'll conjure up when picking through pile after pile of Huggies, empty 12-gauge casing's, and Stroh's Ice.

I don't think I'm normally a huge snob about these things, but WTF is the deal with Spanaway? It reminds me of what happens when domesticated animals go feral and form colonies.

Eatonville/Enumclaw. Worst places to live? I'd have to vote for Parkland/Spanaway/Tillicum for overall suck-factor, mitigated only slightly by their relative proximity to Mt. Rainier.

Yea. They should take the example of the current crop of conservatives and stick the bill to their grandchildren. Now that's sound fiscal management. Just my opinion that most Left-of-Center organizations are long on MFA's and short on MBA's. That could be true. In my experience however, most of my friends are a little left of center and damn near all of them are either engineers, IT, or have an MBA. Seems common in Seattle. I realize this doesn't address the issue of what the breakdown in the organizations are; but I wouldn't think an educated contingency would let people without proven analytical skills run things for them. Just a guess... Maybe they should apply at Air America. This is sort of an aside, but another unfounded observation of mine is that people that smart people with a lot of specialized training seem to suffer from a kind of hubris that doesn't always serve them well in fields where things are a bit messier than in the world of say, integrated circuit design.

Does the record indicate that most Norther glaciers achieved a steady-state after the Little Ice Age or if on the whole they've been in a steady retreat since then? Any indications on when alpine glaciers reached their maximum after the end of the last ice age? Just wondering how far down valley the glaciers on Rainier, Hood, etc may have extended when they reached their maximum volumes.

Yea. They should take the example of the current crop of conservatives and stick the bill to their grandchildren. Now that's sound fiscal management. Just my opinion that most Left-of-Center organizations are long on MFA's and short on MBA's.

When successful businesses voluntarily re-organize under no duress whatsoever, does that process normally include not paying their most valuable employees? "Franken, in a recent interview, said the network was suffering from "a cash flow problem." "No cash has been flowing to me," Franken, who makes a reported $2 million a year, told The New York Sun. "That's the first inkling I got of a cash flow problem." Horn said no decision was made on any filing, and that the network was unsure about the source of the bankruptcy rumors. Franken said it was last week when he discovered that his paychecks had stopped." I'm sure that there's a market for another perspective in commercial radio, and I actually hope that some kind of left-wing talk format stays on the air for a long time - but I think that the kind of financial ineptitude that has characterized the network's operations since the get-go is hillarious, and is highly symptomatic of people who are long on righteous zeal and short on pragmatism and business sense, two characteristics which aren't necessarily unique to leftists, but which does seem to be an especially vexing problem for their organizations.