JayB

Headed down to Lincoln City to spend some time with my best friend, his wife/kids, and extended family before he returns to Iraq for his second tour...and took the kayak out in the surf with a bunch of seals playing in close proximity. Very good weekend.

If only I had that much hair Seriously - if that's all the hostility that I get after that post I will count myself lucky. If someone really wanted to get hostile they would dig up a real photo.

I am not sure that there are actually all that many real relationships destroyed because a guy can't handle his girlfriend climbing harder than him and/or compensating with snide remarks. The primary reason for this is - very few women climb harder than their male partners. This is because on average men are better climbers than women.* I have come across at least a couple of hundred climbing couples in practice, and have yet to ever witness a pair in which the woman obviously outclasses her boyfriend, much less a situation in which the said boyfriend is a dour, doughy, emasculated husk of a man who has to compensate by sending up snide comments from the weak end of the rope. Does it happen - certainly. Is it common? No. Is it common enough to be elevated to "classic relationship killer" status for most women that climb? No. I would venture that in this situation a guy is just as likely to be psyched about latching onto such a badass chick as he is to feel bitter and threatened by it. I have a suspicion that part of this is also due to the fact that for every guy that feels threatened by a female climber of superior abilities there's a woman who isn't comfortable dating a guy that's weaker than she is on the rock, probably for the same reason that very few women are attracted to men that are shorter and/or weaker than they are. Some examples that come to mind are Steph Davis/Dean Potter, Jason/Tiffany Campbell, Beth Rodden/Tommy Caldwell. I have no idea what brought them together or what the nature of the attraction was but it is curious that these ladies - who would absolutely lay waste to 99.99999999999999% percent of the male climbing population chose from amongst the miniscule pool of men who actually climb harder than they do. *Thankfully I am not in need of dates at the moment so I could honestly care less if incite an everlasting hatred in the women that read this board. **I learned to climb trad by following a woman, and she remains one of the boldest, toughest climbers I've ever tied in with. But there's a reason why she had to climb with guys (who climb a hell of a lot harder than I do) when she wanted to hit a route with someone of equal ability.

"Diddler on the Roof" "The Load Warrior" "The Field of Reams" "Lawrence of Alabia" "Roger in Me"

That's a nice synopsis about the reasons people currently oppose the occupation of Iraq - but I was talking about why people opposed the war - as in before it commenced - rather than why people currently object to our presence there. It is clear to anyone who honestly appraises the arguments employed by those who opposed removing Hussein by force prior to the invastion, that the current problems to claim vindiction for an opposition that was based on an entirely different set of arguments. Very few people based their opposition to the war on the grounds that Hussein had no WMD. Didn't see many "Take Saddam's Word for it! There are no WMD in Iraq!" placards on display at the marches, or dangling from the overpasses on Highway 99. The arguments were "No Blood for Oil," the "Dark Cabal of Texas Oilmen" subverting the world's democracies for their own benefit theory (a personal favorite, no?), the tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties that would be a direct result of the offensive, etc, etc, etc - none of which has been validated by events there. Per the current opposition - there's a bunch of nice sentiment there - but I am left wondering how people who hold those sentiments would translate them into any constructive measures on the ground, and how any of them would benefit the Iraqis, whose welfare was -ironically enough - one of the reasons why people supposedly opposed overthrowing Saddam by force. The fact that the welfare of the Iraqi people had nothing whatsoever to do with opposition to the war has been laid bare by the anti-occupation crowds desire to withdraw our forces without any consideration whatsoever on the impact that this would have upon the Iraqis themselves. My prediction is that such a move would lead inexorably to a massive civil war, the implosion of the Iraqi state, and widespread instability in the ME that would generate casualties at least two orders of magnitude greater than those sustained during the war and the subsequent occupation. I am at a loss to understand how advocating the wholesale abandonment of Iraq to its fate constitutes the moral position here.

You are asking the wrong person about what motivated opposition to the war, but the general vibe emmanating from the "Potlucks for Peace" crew and their soulmates on the board here seemed to be that it was purely a strategic gambit to get our hands on Iraq's oil, and that the said gambit would result in the anhiliation of 10s of thousands of Iraqis during the offensive. The consensus also seemed to be that taking a round of inspections followed by ? (you tell me) would be the best way to insure that Hussein and co were deprived of any current stock of WMD in the present and denied access to them in the future. A related theme that seems to have emerged in the wake of the war is that because we found no WMD, any talk about the risks posed by terrorist groups like Al-Queda and their ilk working in conjunction with rogue states was, is, and always will be nothing more than a neocon tactic to enlist support for their agenda. Should this conclusion ever become the operating consensus that governs the behavior of future governments, I suspect that the world will have the opportunity to lament such blindness. This will be especially true if Iraq implodes while the rest of the world does nothing to avert such an outcome.

Not what the people were chanting on the street, kemosabe. A few articles does not equal a mass movement. Doubts about WMD are not what animated opposition to the war. End of story.

"how many major news outlet were critical of the wmd justification, while progressives were crying foul from the get go?" Maybe one in 10,000 - because this was the consensus opinion of every major intelligence agency in the world, there were major stocks unaccounted for, and the regime's conduct gave every reason to believe that they were engaged in an effort to conceal them. This is the reason that no one involved the movement(s) that would have left Saddam in power was going to stake their argument on this issue. An honest appraisal of the arguments set forth for leaving Saddam in power centered around the argument that the US and England were intent on seizing Iraqi oil by force as doing so would result in a net economic gain for both, and that any attempts to remove Hussein would immediately result in tens of thousands of civilian casualties, mass-starvation, etc. Any attempt to claim otherwise is simply not credible.

"If a reporter wants to report on war, the DoD has to be the primary source. If you report stock prices, you get the info from the NYSE. Are they supposed to call Noam Chomsky for the body count of the latest action in Fajullah or the last earnings report for GE?" Exactly. You are faltering, Evil Homonym. That business about "progressive sources" is your weakest point/rebuttal in quite a while, which is really saying something.

These would be easy questions to answer if we could look into our future and see the consequences of our decisions and how they influenced our fates. One one hand I am in agreement with Bug, inasmuch as you could conceivably eliminate all risk from your life, hole yourself up Howard Hughes style and still die at an early age. However, if one looks at the probabilities involved, it is clear that the more risk you expose yourself too, the greater the probability that you will die as a consequence of the said risks. So, in the end, I think that most people strike a balance between the risk that they will shorten their lives engaging in the activities that they love and the risk that they will squander their lives, forsake their passions, and suffocate their spirits in an effort to reduce the probability that they will lose their lives doing some of the very things that define what living means to them. I suspect that these competing imperatives are constantly in flux for most people, as is the level of risk that they voluntarily adopt. Tough call.

Sorry to intrude on the collective delerium that prompted this thread, but in the specific context of Nick Berg's death, any assertion that this was the work of the United States Government is nothing more than paranoid speculation with no factual basis whatsoever to support it, and as such is on par with the theories normally issuing forth from the folks dodging the black-helicopters, arming themselves against a UN invasion of the US, and/or feverishly awaiting the moment when they are "raptured" out of the double-wide per Jenkins and Lahaye. Good company to be in.

Two words. Occam's. Razor.

"That two of Littleton's children decided to engineer their own mass killing is what these guys and the Internet crazies don't want to discuss." This was a telling moment in "Bowling for Columbine," as it illustrated two of the film's major weaknesses, the first and most nauseating of which is Moore's shameless attempt to exploit the slaughter at Columbine for personal gain. The second of which is the deliberate distortion of the facts and the horrendously flawed logic that he employed in an effort to lay responsibility for the massacre of the students at Raytheon's feet rather than where it belonged, with the two sick, sorry-ass, dickless pieces of shit who constituted the "Trenchcoat Mafia." Yeah - if it weren't for the corrosive effect which Raytheon's presence had on the town's morals, these two hapless victims of the said corrosion might have known that the serial execution of their classmates was wrong. Right - these two individuals weren't responsible for what happened, the blame doesn't rest squarely on their shoulders - they were just two more victims of that horrible corporation. Jesus Fucking Christ.

Yea. Seven >

Always been good for me as well. Free shipping and no tax are two major factors that have earned them my orders.

Sounds like a good idea to me. I'm thinking late July.

Dang! For some reason I thought that this event was going to be held on Thursday!

Regardez, Mes Amis... Oil-for-fraud Apr 22nd 2004 From The Economist Global Agenda A scandal surrounding the UN’s former oil-for-food programme in Iraq has begun to heat up, just as the Bush administration is approaching the UN to take a greater role in the country IT COULDN’T be a worse time for a scandal. George Bush’s administration recently praised a proposal for greater involvement by the United Nations in Iraq’s political future. The plan, drafted by the UN’s special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, would let the UN choose, in consultation with America, ministers to run Iraq after the June 30th handover of sovereignty. Yet just as the Bush administration and the UN are starting to cosy up to each other, allegations of massive fraud in the UN’s former oil-for-food programme for Iraq have heated up. On Wednesday April 21st, the Security Council unanimously approved a resolution requiring all UN members to co-operate with an official probe into the affair, led by Paul Volcker, a former head of America’s Federal Reserve. American conservatives who dislike the world body can hardly contain their glee. The oil-for-food programme was established in 1996 to allow Iraq, devastated by years of sanctions, to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian supplies, principally food and medicine. The programme was run out of the UN secretariat, and supervised by members of the Security Council. It is often described as the biggest humanitarian programme in history, delivering over $30 billion-worth of goods to Iraq. The programme ended in 2003, after the war that toppled Saddam’s regime. The United Nations announces its measures for an independent inquiry into the oil-for-food programme. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee posts transcripts of its review of the programme and Dick Lugar's opening statement. The GAO publishes its latest report, which was presented at the hearing. See also a US Embassy report from May 2003. The French Embassy to the US issues a response to the allegations. Allegations of wrongdoing in the programme are nothing new; Britain and America complained of this before the war. But the breadth and depth of the alleged fraud now go far beyond what was thought at the time. In January, an independent Iraqi newspaper, al-Mada, published a list of 270 names (of individuals, companies and institutions) it claimed to have found in Iraqi oil ministry documents. Those named were said to have received oil contracts under the programme, either as thanks for political support for Saddam’s regime, for turning a blind eye to corruption or in payment for illegal imports. Those who were handed these contracts could then sell them on to legitimate oil traders. The scheme appeared to allow its beneficiaries to say they had never taken money from the Iraqi government. The list of alleged beneficiaries includes a senior UN official and top French, Indonesian and Russian politicians. The documents behind the list have yet to be authenticated, however. In addition to allegedly buying political support through the oil contracts, Saddam’s regime itself looks to have profited enormously from the scheme. The General Accounting Office (GAO), an arm of the American Congress, reported last month that prices for humanitarian imports were inflated by some 10%. This allowed the regime to sell 10% more oil to pay for the imports and to cream the extra money off for itself. In addition, the GAO said that the regime managed to sell over $5 billion-worth of oil illegally outside the programme. In all, Saddam’s government may have netted almost $10 billion from its chicanery. The accusations have triggered a round of finger-pointing. Richard Lugar, the head of a Senate panel conducting one of three congressional probes into the scandal, said on April 7th that, to pull off the scam, Saddam would have needed members of the Security Council to be “complicit in his activities”. The French ambassador to America, Jean-David Levitte, noted in response that America sat on the sanctions committee that approved all contracts. John Negroponte, America’s ambassador to the UN, admitted that while sitting on that committee, America had been more worried about keeping military goods out of Iraq than about corruption. The Iraqi Governing Council, for its part, is conducting its own investigation through KPMG, a consultancy. This all comes at a delicate time, when America is hoping that a new UN resolution on Iraq will convince more countries to offer troops or financial support. A reconciliation between the United States and the UN has been slow in coming after the Bush administration’s decision to go to war without the backing of the body, and given its continued wariness towards multilateralism. Congressional conservatives and right-wing journalists have long warned against giving the UN a major role in Iraq. According to these critics, the organisation is at best inefficient and at worst corrupt; and the Security Council is an unrepresentative relic of the 1940s, where France and Russia wield vetoes despite their fall from global pre-eminence, while big players like Japan, Germany, India and Brazil clamour in vain for the same privilege. Moreover, opponents pin a number of abject humanitarian failures, from Rwanda to Bosnia, on the UN. Just this week, a report on a “reign of terror” by the Sudanese government in the western region of Darfur was kept out of a meeting of the Commission on Human Rights. This was because the UN has only just been given permission to visit Darfur. Human-rights groups accuse Sudan of manipulating the world body to play for time. Of those named in the oil-for-food inquiry, few, if any, are expected to come out unscathed. Mr Volcker hopes to give an update in three months. He has said that if there is any substance to the accusations, best to “get it out in a hurry and cauterise the wound”. Given the depth of divisions at the “United” Nations, this looks optimistic. Source

Al Qaeda's Poison Gas The foiled attack in Jordan might have killed thousands. Thursday, April 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT Jordanian authorities say that the death toll from a bomb and poison-gas attack they foiled this month could have reached 80,000. We guess the fact that most major media are barely covering this story means WMD isn't news anymore until there's a body count. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi--the man cited by the Bush Administration as its strongest evidence of prewar links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and the current ringleader of anti-coalition terrorism in Iraq--may be behind the plot, which would be al Qaeda's first ever attempt to use chemical weapons. The targets included the U.S. Embassy in Amman. Yet as of yesterday, most news organizations hadn't probed the story, if at all, beyond the initial wire-service copy. Perhaps the problem here is that covering this story might mean acknowledging that Tony Blair and George W. Bush have been exactly right to warn of the confluence of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Jordan's King Abdullah called it a "major, major operation" that would have "decapitated" his government. "Anyone who doubts the terrorists' desire to obtain and use these weapons only needs to look at this example," said Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. More details of the plot emerged Monday night with the dramatic broadcast on Jordanian television of confessions from the terror cell's leader and associates. The idea apparently was to crash trucks--fitted with special battering rams and filled with some 20 tons of explosives--through the gates of targets that included the U.S. Embassy, the Jordanian Prime Minister's office and the national intelligence headquarters. The explosions notwithstanding, the real damage was reportedly to come from dispersing a toxic cloud of chemicals, which included nerve and blister agents. Anonymous U.S. officials have been quoted playing down the WMD wrinkle, suggesting the chemicals may have been meant to merely amplify a conventional explosion. But then much of our "intelligence" bureaucracy is still wedded to the discredited notion that secular tyrants and fundamentalist terrorists don't cooperate (see Hezbollah). They may also be defensive about their earlier, dismissive assessments of Zarqawi's significance. Plotter Hussein Sharif Hussein was shown on Jordanian television saying the aim was "carrying out the first suicide attack to be launched by al Qaeda using chemicals." A Jordanian scientist described a toxic cloud that could have spread for a mile or more. So was it really a foiled WMD attack? Here's hoping someone is trying to get to the bottom of this. The provenance of the operation is also of note. The bomb trucks and funds are said to have entered Jordan via Syria. Last fall General James R. Clapper Jr., director of satellite intelligence for the Pentagon, said there had been an unusual amount of traffic--including possibly WMDs--between Iraq and Syria in the lead-up to war. The terror cell's ringleader, Jordanian Azmi Jayyousi, said he was acting on the orders of Zarqawi, whom he first met at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan: "I took courses, poisons high level, then I pledged allegiance to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." Mr. Jayyousi said this attack had been plotted from Zarqawi's new base of operations in Iraq. A Jordanian court sentenced Zarqawi to death this month for plotting the 2002 murder of U.S diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman. Prime Minister Blair has said it's simply "a matter of time unless we act and take a stand before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together." According to Jordanian authorities, that sometime was intended to be last week. That strikes us as news.

Oh fucking please. Word. to JJA for the retort of the day.

Cloudveil's synthetic belay jacket has worked out pretty well for me so far.

I found this list rather depressing. This is not because I disagree with the specific points that they are attempting to make -which I do - or that the snide nihilsm masquerading as sophistication which pervades the piece grates on me, which it does. It's just that the entire piece has nothing even bearing a slight resemblance to independent thought and analysis within it - despite the author's evident desperation for it to be taken as a serious, incisive critique. It is, if anything, a rather tedious roster of the articles of faith that people with a particular mindset have been chanting to one another in an intellectual echo chamber for decades, modified ever so slightly to suit the times. Weak.

Yup.

I'm not sure that having a uterus endows one with any special insights into the ethical and philosophical matters that lie at the heart of this debate, such as the one concerning when life begins. If you were talking about ovulating, labor pains, or nursing then that would be another matter.

I've thought about this option too. Seems feasible if the snow is firm and you don't need flotation on the way up or down, but could well be useless in soft conditions.