JayB

If you are not at peanut-allergy level sensitivity, there's a bunch of neoprene braces that are lined with fabric that may help with the reaction. I used a brace with a "thermoskin" liner to stabilize my thumb after I sprained it a few weeks ago, and it's been pretty comfortable.

Dang man, sorry to hear about your toes. Hope they heal well. Given any thought to the Vasque Ice9000's? The Asolo Ottomilla's are pretty warm and light, but they're also pretty stiff, so I'm not sure that they'd be all that great for mixed stuff.

Anyone ever read that David Rakoff essay where he goes to a spa/spiritual retreat, and one of the key attractions is a seminar lead by Steven Segall? Very funny stuff.

Yeah - those pics are amazing. For the last pic, all that's missing is the obligatory "Anyone Gonna Get After This?" caption. Too bad about the hanging, bowl-shaped, perfectly-positioned-to-loosen-up-at-the-first-hint-of-sunshine, Snowfield O' Death looming above the entire route.

Impressive stuff. Post a photo with your route marked on it when you get your hands on that "West Face in Winter" shot you've been looking for Ade.

Get your ass-back in that shop and move some merchandise! Just wait until the owner finds out what you've been up to. Oh wait....

I've climbed a few underhyped routes that most people bag on but I actually enjoyed, but I can't think of their names off of the top of my head. It seems like it would be tough to call EDM overhyped - at least to my way of thinking, because to me an overhyped route is something just a bit harder than a trade route that acquires a mystique that's just not warranted by it's difficulty, position, aesthetics, etc. In Since no one has ever repeated the ascent, despite being widely coveted, and the FA's had acquited themselves pretty well on some serious shit elsewhere - it seems like it would be hard to call the EDM overhyped. Maybe "maddeningly difficult to find in condition for the past 20 years" or something would be a better description.

Jesus. Nice effort on the way up, and nice nightmare-fodder on the way down. Glad you are okay.

Congrats to the FWA party on the climb, and compliments to Scurlock on the photos. Easily the best shots of the East Face I've ever seen. Those shots of the rimed-up hut were wild.

You mean this stuff? Maybe someone going for the FA could pay Scurlock a few hundred to drop some avy-charges on the snowslope the day before...

I didn't say I thought that it was the most accurate analysis, just that someone had come to such a conclusion - which caught my attention because I couldn't help but think about the policy implications if it were true. I think that you might be to make the case for Social Security payouts, but still register a net loss when taking into account other spending, lost tax revenue from premature mortality, missed-work days, medicaid payouts, etc. Anyway - I think that this might be the study I was thinking of, but there's a bunch more that disagree with this finding. "A life-cycle study by Manning and others estimated the health care and other costs of smokers. One estimate grouped together private and public pension benefits, Social Security payments, veterans' compensation, and other public payments. The study concluded that over their lifetimes, smokers received about 9 percent less of such income than did nonsmokers. The Manning team's study also looked at how much smokers and nonsmokers paid in earnings-related taxes. It found that smokers paid about 2 percent less in those taxes than did nonsmokers as a result of their shorter life spans and higher incidence of disability. When the excess medical costs of smokers were taken into account, Manning found that the net costs of smoking that were not paid directly by smokers or their families were equivalent to 33 cents per pack of cigarettes (in 1995 dollars). That cost is well below the combined federal and average state excise taxes of about 56 cents per pack. But those who are paying extra costs because of smoking-related illnesses are not necessarily being fully compensated for the costs. For example, although smoking reduces the costs of some benefits such as pensions, the benefit plans that receive such savings generally do not also pay the additional costs that result from smoking. Similarly, the revenue from excise taxes on cigarettes is not directly distributed to entities, such as private health plans, that incur the greatest additional costs of smoking" Much more on this stuff here: http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=407&sequence=2 Much more complicated than you'd think.

"More and More Moderate Muslims Speak Out in Denmark" Dozens of Danish Muslims are joining the network of moderate Muslims, the Demokratiske Muslimer (Democratic Muslims). About 700 Muslims have already become DM members and 2,500 Danes have expressed their will to support the network. The initiative has caused anger among the Danish imams and their leader, Ahmad Abu Laban, who have referred to the moderates as “rats.” The imams feel that they are beginning to lose their control over part of the Muslim population. Moderates such as Kamran Tahmasebi say they have had enough of fanatic Islamism and its intimidation of the Muslim immigrants in Denmark. “It is an irony that I am today living in a European democratic state and have to fight the same religious fanatics that I fled from in Iran many years ago,” Mr Tahmasebi says. He came to Denmark as a refugee in 1989. Today he works as a social consultant and is very grateful for the life Denmark has made it possible for him to have. He says he no longer wants to keep a low profile to avoid attracting the attention of the imams. The cartoon affair was an incentive for him to stand up and warn against the Islamist imams in Denmark, whom he says are damaging the integration process with their misleading criticism of Danish values and norms. Mr Tahmasebi is one of the people involved in the newly established network of moderate Muslims in Denmark led by Naser Khader, a member of the Danish Parliament. He says he is well aware of the risk he is taking by siding with Mr Khader, who has for a long time been living under police protection. But Mr Tahmasebi feels it is his duty to take part in this debate. “Naser Khader has carried this responsibility for too long. I share his beliefs and now I want to stand up and say so. Apart from that, as a parent I feel a responsibility to fight, so that my children will not have to live under Islamist dogmas. They shall be able to live free in this country.” Mr Tahmasebi adds that he believes the imams are one of the biggest problems Denmark is facing today. The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, will be meeting the leaders of the moderate Muslims today (February 13) to discuss the cartoon affair. The Danish government has suspended all dialogue and cooperation with the Danish imams on the integration process. Some of the strongest protests against the twelve Muhammad cartoons [see them here, halfway down the page] came from imams who are members of the government’s official integration think tank. “We want the newspaper [Jyllands-Posten, which published the cartoons last September] to promise that this will never happen again, or this will never stop,” says imam Ahmad Akkari, the spokesman for the radical Muslim organizations in Denmark which led the protest against the cartoons. However, the deliberate lies which imams, such as Abu Laban and Akkari, used to incite worldwide hatred against Denmark have served as a wake-up call for the Danish government. “I believe it has become obvious that the imams are not the people we should be listening to if we want integration in Denmark to work,” Rikke Hvilshøj, the Danish Integration Minister, has said."

Not sure which facts you're disputing here, Jim, but consult the rankings of political freedom, and those of economic freedom, and crank out a regression analysis for yourself. As far as the corrupt regimes go - the fact that heavy state control of the economies is the principle engine of corruption should be part of your analysis - given that most politicians have to make some concessions to the world that exists when making choices, it seems like it would be rather difficult to engage in any contact with the Middle East at all under the terms you've laid out. Pressing for free trade agreements would help transfer power into the hands of the people and out of the hands of the autocrats, but I don't see you supporting such a move either.

It seems pretty clear to me that if people spent as much time climbing as they did driving there'd be no mistaking which was the more dangerous.

Well - we are talking theoretical here. I think that they key to making the Islamic-Radical Leper Colony strategy work is making the deterrent robust enough to keep the mayhem confined to their own borders, while remaining hands off enough so that there's no mistaken who's responsible for their wretched lives.

Which is precisely why most muslims in Europe moved there! Having their immigrant goals of transcending bigotry and zealotry thrown back in their faces by zenophobic danish bigots who refuse to acknowledge any of their positive contributions to danish society pisses off and alienates the would-be assimilators off. Nobody deserves congratulations for doing a normal job well, but everybody appreciates it. From what i hear, the islamic immigrants to northern europe would at least like to be thanked for providing doner as an alternative to sausages for street food rather than be constantly discriminated against and treated as subhuman by other citizens or area residents. On a side note, i've never seen more bigotry and racial hatred than between east germans and turkish germans. Its really crazy and frankly kind of scary. Personally, I think the dossier of the Danish Imams is baroque, bizarre and mostly very wrong. It's also really really weird. Read it, you'll see what I mean when I say it seems to have been written by a bipolar nutjob who wanted to catastrophically destroy the reputation of anybody who read it and took it seriously. It's worse than the protocols of zion. I think that your views on Iran are very rosy colored glasses. The Danes and Swedes I met over 15 years ago talked about this problem, so it's no surprise that the Arab immigrants are frustrated - but the bottom line is that they need way, way better leadership - more MLK, less Malcom X. If your public leaders favor an agenda which rejects assimilation and cooperation in favor of rejectionism and violence, it's not surprising that the native population will react badly to that. I'm sure that things can be tough for them there, but these are the freaking Danes and Swedes we're talking about here, it's not like the immigrants are confronting anything like the antebellum South.

Well - the bottom line in all of this is that any group of people who organize their politics around millitant Islam, or their economies on socialism - will wind up in the shitter. Embracing both will accelerate the process still further - and the burned hand teaches best. I think that one of the biggest obstacles to political reform in the Middle East is the fact that most of the countries there still adhere to the old, discredited, pan-Arab socialist model cooked up by Nasser. The staggering failures of this model played a huge role in generating both the popular discontent, and the political repression in the middle East. It's really the same wherever you go - when the state controls all of the industry and the wealth, this raises the stakes of political change in a very destructive way. All of a sudden losing an election not only means that you are out of office, but you are broke, powerless, and probably have very good reason to fear for your life. Hence the reluctance all around the Middle East to allow free and fair elections - it's not just the prospect of the Islamists taking over, it's the prospect of losing the ability to direct patronage to one's favorites, skimming off the top of the national purse, etc - not to mention the possibility of someone taking a look at the books and dispatching an armed contingent to your villa when they figure out what you've been up to. For those that take over the reins in a socialist economy, the ability to determine who eats and who starves is a handy means of asserting control. Unfortunately most of the Middle East is convinced that it's Uncle Sam and the Jews that are responsible for their lot in life, rather than the retrograde tendencies invariably coming along with consenting to live in a quasi theocracy, and the stagnation and poverty that socialism guarantees. I say let them install the Mullah's, give total control of their economies to the state, let the fanatics turn their attention towards repressing their fellow citizens instead of blighting the rest of the world, watch from the sidelines, and contain the whole circus within a Hadrian's Wall of heavily armed democracies - and wait for the fever to break.

Still a big change from the late-70's early 80's in Iran. If the cartoons were so offensive in and of themselves, it seems odd that the travelling mullah's would have found it necessary to spike them with forgeries that they passed off as originals, and explicity enlisted the help of other influential mullah's and other actors like the Syrian government to stoke the flames, ditto for the fact that the cartoons were published in Egypt and generated zero reaction. At the end of the day, unless folks realize that the death-threats, the suicide bombings, the honor killings - etc tarnish their image far more effectively than any cartoon ever could - the same backwardness, stagnation, and decline that compelled so many to emmigrate to Europe in the hopes of something better will be theirs to endure indefinitely.

First of Many Maxing yourself out with the no-doc, interest-only/neg-AM loan for the "investment" that rent for less than half of the value of the mortgage, even at the teaser rate, while a record number of identical units is coming on the market and rates are going nowhere but up. Yeeha. If it wasn't a surefire path to riches, it wouldn't be so popular. Carlton sheets, what hath thou wrought...

I think that the Federal government actually turns a profit on smokers because the extra medical costs are outweighed by the reduction in social security payouts due to increased mortality. It's been a while, but I think that there was a RAND study that came out on this a while ago.

It would really take too long to has out those points all at once, but it's worth touching on the fanaticism-dissipation side of things. The funny thing about Iran is that the population there is more pro-American than just about any other country in the Muslim world, and probably ranks fairly highly in this category on a global scale. I was just discussing some of these issues with a colleage from Iran who has an American spouse, who informed me that on their last visit to Iran, when the cab-drivers found out that the spouse was American - they made it a point to either write down addresses, or drive them pass certain buildings - with a request that the spouse pass them along to George W. Bush so that he'd know where to send the bombs. This is kind of a funny story that isn't worth much more than a laugh, except for the fact that it shows that popular resentment has turned decisively against the Mullahs and reactionary Islam, which is quite a change from 20 years ago. Any "Islamic State" of the sort envisioned by the Islamic Brotherhood, Hamas, etc is going to be stagnant, repressive, and corrupt - and the responsibility for this condition will clearly and squarely lie on the shoulders of the folks who are running the show. Once that happens, the people will start to look elsewhere for a model that can deliver what their revolution has failed to. The challenge is to contain the fanatics effectively and constrain their behavior outside their borders with an overwhelming deterent capability and better counter-intelligence. The multiple rude awakenings the Euro's have been treated to despite their behavior over the past 30 years is already generating some movement on this front, and why the topic of closer security cooperation with Israel is quietly being broached in Europe. I wouldn't be surprised to see much closer security cooperation with India going forward either.

Just seemed like it would take an even longer response than even I can hammer out at the moment. Three key components would be letting mashochistic democracy/revolution -------> fanaticism dissipation run its course Iran-style, closer coordination of defense and intelligence amongst liberal democracies through an enlarged NATO, and defiance in the face of continued threats and attacks. Promoting economic liberalism after the masses have become dissilusioned with the mullah-induced poverty and stagnation, but that'd be quite a few years down the road.

"Good argument, there JayB. If I understand you correctly, what it all boils down to is this: if the White House wants it published to embarass their enemies, whether it is a leak that may endanger our national security or not, go for it If somebody else wants to publish something that might rile an enemy of ours, go for it. If somebody wants to publish something that might make our government look bad? Lets look very carefully for a reason why it might be "unAmerican." " That's not actually my argument at all - what I was saying is that there's a significant difference between finding a balance between disclosure and security in a democratic society, and submitting to the perogatives of a band of violent fanatics. I do differentiate between our national interests, and the interests of say, those of Al-Queda or the North Koreans - I know this is anethema to the kumbaya contingent but I'm perfectly happy to part company with them on this point - so I think that if there are cases where the distribution of certain information will be detrimental to their interests and beneficial to ours, it's perfectly legitimate for policymakers to take that into account.

This is already a big factor in life insurance markets. I personally think that if going after smokers and fat-people is okay - which I think it is - climbers should be fair game too. I think if the actuaries actually crunched the numbers there's be a fairly good tradeoff between the extra expenses associated with injuries, and the extra health benefits associated with the extra activity. The fact that climbing injuries are so often fatal would probably also mitigate the expense somewhat, which explains why most health insurers could care less about skydiving when figuring out how much to charge for coverage.

I heard that there are photos of him jaywalking circulating on the web as well.