JayB

I think a significant ground offensive immediately after the air campaign would probably have been more effective in actually achieving Israel's stated objective, but I'm not sure that intense ground fighting would result in fewer civilian casualties, given the fact that Hizbullah hasn't evinced much in the way of an effort to separate themselves from civilians and get the civilians out of harm's way. I'm not sure that Israel's tactics have been the wisest here, but it seems to me that they've done everything that they could to minimize civilian casualties - as if they elected to pay no heed to civilian lives they could have easily flattened any or all of Lebanon and been done with it. So by taking measures to limit civilian casualties as much as possible in the face of a massive rocket bombardment undertaken to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, I'd say that Israel has lived up to it's moral responsibilities as a more powerful democratic state that's aspiring to live by a higher set of ideals than their enemies. I am not sure if there's any way that they could respond to these missile attacks that would eliminate civilian casualties alogether, other than battening down the hatches and waiting until Hezbollah exhausts its arsenal, but I don't think it's reasonable for the rest of the world to expect them to do that when no other nation on Earth would accept that kind of limitation on their ability to respond while being attacked.

I personally think that holding Potlucks for Peace is the way out of this one.

If you've got some time to spare, maybe you could parse out the percentage of deaths at the hands of US forces, versus sectarian violence, versus random murder and crime. To get back to one of your consistent themes - it seems to me that you are arguing that there is no distinction between physical and moral equivalence, and that all civilian deaths resulting from combat are morally equivalent to one another. By that reasoning soldiers who inadvertently kill civilians in a crossfire while trying to rescue them from certain execution at the hands of their captors are morally equivalent to soldiers that deliberately seeking out civilians and kill them? Or am I misunderstanding something about your position? The stance that physical equivalence = moral equivalence seems to be the only framework in which one could argue that the actions of the Israeli military and those of Hezbollah are morally equivalent.

I don't think that Israel's tactics have been especially wise, and if their objective was to deny Hezbollah's ability to use Southern Lebanon as a staging area, I think they would have been better served by undertaking a massive ground invasion by now. Whether or not that'll succeed is an open question, and there's clearly the potential to make things worse.

Now that I've had a chance to look at the photos in a sequence, I think that you can use the rocky protrusion that I've circled in this photo as a common point of reference in all of these photos.

Nisqually Glacier Photo Assault. The photo series spans the time period from 1904-1969. All photos from: "American Geographical Society/World Data Center-A for Glaciology Photograph held by the National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder." 1904 1912 1929 1931 1942 1955 1964 1969 From the last photo it looks as though the maximum advance was somewhere in the vicinity of the modern roadway. Anyone care to speculate where the 1904 terminus lies in the last photo?

Good resource for old glacier photos... http://nsidc.org/cgi-bin/gpd_run_search.pl

There was a great thread a while back in which someone (Lowell Skoog?) posted photos of some prominent peaks in the North Cascades taken decades ago, along with recent shots taken from the same Vantage Point. I've heard quite a bit about the extent to which the glaciers have retreated over the course of the 20th century, and it would be quite interesting to see old panoramic photos from the old days in order to see just how dramatic the change has been. It'd also be cool to see climbing photos or any other photos from way back when. If I recall correctly, I remember hearing something about either Stevens or Van Trump climbing Mt. Rainier 30 years after their first ascent, and commenting that in that time the Nisqually glacier had retreated by something like a mile. That seems impossible, but the retreat must have been considerable. Anyone know more about? How far out are the ancient moraines?

Anyone know why Toyota has never sold the HiLux diesel in the US?

If your main objective is just to get to the places where other people park - ski area parking lots, Sno-Parks, pull-outs on plowed roads, etc - some kind of fuel efficient AWD is the way to go. If you want something that has a chance of getting you through some snow-patches that would stop the typical passenger car en route to a trailhead in the spring, then something with around 10" of clearance and a locking rear differential is probably the way to go. Make sure to pack a come-along or two, a shovel, and a length of static cord as well as the odds are pretty good that you'll find yourself using them if you probe enough snow-patches. Other folks may know more about this, but I've heard that grinding through deep patches of heavy snow is a pretty good way to fry a stock clutch, even if you're in 4-low, so I think that unless you're also a 4x4 hobbyist, just parking where everyone else does will probably save you lots of time and money. Having said all of that - having 4WD and some clearance has come in pretty handy for me from time to time.

Cool trip. Thanks for sharing the photos and story. I did sorta the same thing for a proposal, except I stashed the ring and a note in a fake summit register, which my wife promptly threw a coat over the nook where I stashed it and fell asleep. When it was time to go, she was ready to leave without giving the "register" a second look, so I had to pretend that I was looking for something else and then say "Hey - look what I found...."

I'm not too familiar with the racing scene, so here's a question for those that are. Is testosterone something that most riders feel would give them a competitive advantage? I'm not aware of many edurance atheletes that think that a non-specific bulking-up of major muscle groups would do anything but hinder them. Even in men's swimming, the consensus seems to be that 'roids would be detrimental, as the musculature that you develop from swimming is optimal, and any additional bulk would just slow you down.

Very nice photos. Maybe you could just write some code so that the rest of us can just hit a button and let the computer do the work for us...

Seattle really, really, really, really doesn't need to be anything like New York or Boston. Trust me. Not worth the tradeoff.

That sucks. A couple of years ago two friends of mine were flying out from Colorado to climb Rainier via the Kautz or the Finger in mid-June, with the intention of hanging out through 3-4 days of bad weather if that's what'd take to get a shot at climbing the mountain. Neither had much vacation time or money, so they were more than happy to hang-out of the mountain if that's what they'd need to do to get a crack at the mountain after investing so much time, energy and cash into the climb. I figured I'd reduce the slog factor a bit by stashing a rope, some food, and fuel up there. I buried everything about 3 feet deep in a plastic bag behind the rocks beneath the turtle snowfield, and marked the spot with a wand. Just in case anyone got curious and/or the bag melted out, I wrote a note explaining when we'd be there, and asking folks not to disturb the cache unless it was a matter of life or death for them, sealed the note in a bag, and duct-taped it to the outside of the bag. I was mighty dissapointed when we got up there and found the bag torn open and half of the fuel cannisters and some of the food gone. Thankfully for my friends, we had a great weather window, and there was no need to hunker down for any length of time - but needless to say I was mighty dissapointed and my friends were flat out disgusted. Very bad mountain karma for someone out there...

Story ONTARIO: Camper kills attacking bear with knife...

Is Prop 13 indexed to anything that's directly connected to a fundamental need for increasing outlays, like inflation or population growth - or are the increases fixed in a more arbitrary fashion? I am not terribly familiar with Prop 13, and have heard rumors of some pretty ill conceived provisions. These include descendant's inheriting Granny's Prop 13 tax basis of the property is transmitted to heirs without a sale, and a loophole that allows people to use Prop 13 limitations in conjunction with commercial property if they use the right ownership structure. Not sure if this stuff is accurate, but it'd be interesting to hear from someone who's familiar with the measure. Doesn't CA have a pretty full roster of taxes besides property taxes? Sales tax, state income tax, and property taxes? It'd be interesting to see some stats on tax receipts and spending per capita, and the percentage of tax receipts derived from housing versus other taxes for California relative to other states.

The fact that anyone in the profession is defending the Asbestos Megacluster under any pretense, for starters.

It is surprising that companies that sell booze haven't been subject to a wave of equally dubious lawsuits. One reason is because they were smart enough to realize that acknowledging that drinking can be bad for your health, and moreover that acknowlegding medical facts would have no effect whatsoever on their sales. I think another, more important factor is that drinking is both more widespread and not nearly as frowned upon as smoking in this culture, so supporting this kind of lawsuit might be a political liability, unlike the case with tobacco.

I'm not sure how to define "really hurt," in this context, but I'm sure there's a precedent or two that they could follow to make that kind of determination. I wouldn't support them making up a punishment out of the blue that's totally inconsistent with the principles used to determine the fines levied against other enterprises. If any of the folks at the tobacco company broke the law by either committing purgery or some other offense then by all means they should be punished.

What makes ME sick is the insurance companies trying to fool the public into thinking that legal liability is what is driving a medical industry crisis, or the President's saying that all the asbestos claims are frivolous, or all the completely bullshit fabricated stories of "outrageous" personal injury lawsuits. No one is saying, for example, that each and every Asbestosis related claim is fraudulent. Most people who are well acquainted with the issue and are not trial lawyers have conceded that there's overwhelming evidence of massive fraud in asbestosis related class action lawsuits, and that continued litigation - rather than a legislative settlement - is injurious to everyone except the lawyers engaged in the lawsuit. Brief Summary Brief highlight: "Silicosis, like asbestosis, is a scarring of the lungs but is caused by the inhalation of large quantities of fine sand dust. Like asbestosis, silicosis, once a scourge, is a disappearing disease because of strict government regulations and employer practices. Deaths attributable to silicosis have dropped over 80% in the past 30 years. But beginning in 2002, claim filings in state courts, mostly in Mississippi, reached "epidemic" proportions. The reasons for the "epidemic" are that key states began to adopt comprehensive asbestos litigation reform and Congress took up consideration of a fund (paid for by defendants and insurance companies) to pay claims as a way of taking asbestos litigation out of the tort system. Worried about the future of their enterprise, lawyers, doctors and screening companies abruptly shifted gears from ginning up claims based on asbestosis to claims based on silicosis. As one lawyer acknowledged, "why reinvent the wheel." All this became clear when 10,000 of the 35,000 pending silica claims were centralized into a federal multi-district litigation (MDL), presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, a Clinton appointee. During the course of the MDL, one of the doctors who diagnosed 3,617 of the 10,000 plaintiffs as having silicosis recanted all of his diagnoses, provoking Judge Jack to observe that "it's clear this . . . diagnosing] business is fraudulent." She went on to issue an unprecedented order that allowed defendants to cross examine every doctor in her presence who had provided a silicosis diagnosis as well as the owners of the screening companies." I hardly think that all attorneys are Satan's Foul Minions, but you seem to be arguing that the public's interest is always aligned with that of the Trial Lawyers in particular and the legal profession in general, which is an opinion that seems to be confined to...Trial Lawyers. I'm no enemy of either attorneys or the concept of legal accountability, but the profession is doing both itself and the public a disservice by refusing to either acknowledge a need for any reform whatsoever, and by defending even the most outrageous abuses of the legal system by the peers.

I think in the case of tobacco companies, I would have been happy to see a judgement issued by a Federal Court which hit them with a punitive fine for knowingly issuing false information about the hazards associated with using their product, and compelling them to issue a public statement in which they acknowlegdge the well established medical facts concerning tobacco use. You lied, pay a fine, acknowledge the facts - end of story. This outcome would provide the accountability and transparency that people seem to think is the crux of the issue. What I would not have is what we got, which was a legal settlement in which the states collectively foisted their fiscal woes upon the manufacturer of a legal product on the premise that they were responsible for health consequences that resulted from the trillions of choices that individuals collectively made over several decades to continue smoking despite the unambigous, well-established, and abundantly clear risks associated with smoking.

Matt: I hardly think the suit against the tobacco companies is the best basis upon which to defend any of the principles that you are articulating. It's also clear that you are conflating unlike situations. A more accurate analogy would be the case of a home buyer who disregards the results of a home inspection, sees an itemized summary of the home's faults nailed to the door, and buys the home anyway because the seller swears up and down that anyone who says there's a problem with the home is a liar. Like it or not, we live in a world where adults have to asses the validity of information supplied by a variety of actors with a variety of motives, not all of whom have our best interests at heart. From my perspective, society is better served by acknowledging this reality, and doing so hardly requires the kind of accepting the kind of free for all that you are suggesting will come about if we uphold a reasonable standard of judgement and common sense in the courts.

Still more odd when you look at how the settlement money has been spent by the states.