JayB

Just admit that it's your fault for being a hopeless NASCAR junkie and move on....

I was too busy using my newfound abundance of spare time elsewhere today to do much replying, but the claims that PP makes w/r/t Leftists in the West turning a blind eye to these atrocities - mass murder on scales that literally have no parallel anywhere in history outside of the Third Reich. This is a historical fact that has been so thoroughly documented in so many books that there is no longer any dispute in the matter. People on both sides of the spectrum have willfully overlooked their fare share of outrages but I there's really nothing out there that can compete with the state-sponsored carnage that occured within the Soviet Union or Communist China in terms of duration or scope, or the continuing dismissal/denial of both by the Western left. I think I did the math at one point and the Chinese Communists alone killed something like 30,000 times more people than Pinochet yet Mao recieved rather fullsome eulogies from nearly every Leftist of note on the planet when he passed away. Rather odd, that.

I was gonna be there for ya homie but the multiple bus accident on northbound I-5 this afternoon put the mighty kibosh on Alpinfox and I's attempt to escape from Seattle. We had to pull the plug at 145th at 6:15. Lameness. Anyhow - hope the show went well and I am still down for the last weekend of March/First weekend of April Smithfest.

I was there last Tuesday (driving by on the way to Paradise) and noticed that there were about three-or four lines forming up, with only one of them touching down. I don't have my Ice Guide to use as a reference for names, but if I remember correctly the fattest line looked to be to the left of the bridge, on the far side (if you are driving towards Paradise) about 250-500 meters from the bridge itself. It looked a bit wet and a wee bit thin, but looked like it would go at somewhere in the WI3-4 range in the condition it was in.

j_b is going to have to go cold Turkey and ditch his NASCAR habbit or we're all gonna die........... Speaking of Kyoto, it would be interesting to take a survey of all of the people that cite the Kyoto accord and note how many of them have actually read the thing. At the time it was published I think the prediction was that if fully implemented it would reduced total global emissions by around 1%, and all developing nations like China and India are completely excempt from the treaty. Given their rates of population and economic growth, any attempt to reduce global CO2 emissions that excludes these two nations alone will not have much of an effect on global climate change. The most sensible and effective way to reduce emissions in practice would be to give consumers and corporations an economic incentive to reduce their output of CO2 through targeted tax credits for fuel efficient motor vehicles, the creation of a market for emissions credits, etc, etc, etc. Incremental change by means of small, practical measures that result from people acting in a manner that is consistent with what they perceive to be their best interest is almost always far more effective at changing the way society operates than abrupt, jarring changes brought about by coercive measures. If it were up to me I would have the US sign the thing and then ignore it like the rest of the world and be done with it, as doing so would be an easy way of forcing the anti-globalist, anti-capitalist, anti-american parlor-marxist crew to be a bit more creative when searching for fodder for their diatribes. On a related note, raise your hand if you uncritically accepted all of Paul Ehrlich's (early 1970s) predictions about the catastrophic shortages of food, water, and natural resources that was supposed to wreak havoc on the world well before the end of the century.

Check Yo PM's Foo.

Awesome.

Nice.

I thought homophone referred to a same-sex chatline....

I've wanted to get triples in hand sizes for a long time - I might consider getting one of these in the place of another number two and number three. Or I could just use the hexes that I've already got for the odd climb where I'd actually want to triple-up - but I could see myself having a moment of weakness in a gear shop and shelling out for one of these if the initial feedback is good.

Just admit that you have been engaged in compulsive bidding for the autographed, life-sized velvet Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster on e-bay and you'll feel a whole lot better....

I had this hunch that my evil homonym was a closet NASCAR fan. Must be a guilty pleasure.

Yeah Pax I'll get in touch...

Dude - the neck beard alone will get you served anywhere!!!!!!! I haven't been anywhere near the campus in years, but there must be a pizza joint or something like it that serves fermented products as well.

I liked the photos Scott. Looks like a cute baby. Congrats - Good work on that one.

Done. I propose a mini Pub Club after the slide show. I'll try to make it to the show/PC.

I actually just pulled the rear bail out, slapped the plate on, and then re-attatched the bail. I've used them on volcano slogs, ice, mixed, scree, etc and they've stayed put with nothing more than the ends of the bail holding them in place. I considered it a stopgap at the time but it seemed to work so well that I haven't bothered to change it.

My guess is that men stay warmer because a greater percentage of their body mass is lean muscle, and all of the mitochondria cranking through the TCA cycle within the said muscle equals more calories burned per unit mass which in turn leads to a higher metabolism and greater warmth. I'd also be willing to bet that men have a lower surface-to-volume ratio than women in the torso, which leads to greater heat loss. I'd also say that social conditioning plays a role as well, as from about the age of 7 any guy that complains to other guys about being cold will have a staggering quantity of shit flipped his way by any male within earshot while most young girls that complained about being cold would get sympathy and an extra insulating layer from anyone in earshot. I think an experiment in which bodybuilder chicks that have attained large amounts of lean muscle and a plenitude of secondary male sexual characteristics from massive roid abuse and pasty endormorphic computer techs with modified mullets and jiggly manboobs are subjected to the same amount of cold, and both the persistence and the tone of the whining that issue forth from both groups are monitored and quantified would settle the muscle-vs-metabolism-vs-sex question once and for all.

How about another MiniSmithfest in the last weekend in March?

Must have touched a nerve there, eh? No pun intended. Just a lot of harnesses out there that keep the leg loops a healthier distance away from the nards IMO. Hanging belays, lowering a heavy partner, catching a fall, taking a fall - all uncomfortable for some of us in this sort of harness. I will say this for the Bod style harnesses - they inspired a few of us to cling to the rock with a tenacity that a simple desire to lead a route cleanly could never have inspired - so perhaps there were some benefits to this design. However - you sired a child recently, no? You are walking proof that my reservations about this harness aren't entirely well founded. All the best to you and your unruptured nards,

Everyone I know who has yet to reproduce and wishes to retain the capacity to do so has sworn off all of the variations of BD's "Bod" harness for ever. - And I use the belay loop.

I thought the revelation that there's some Telemark stuff out there that is so stiff and ungainly that you can't even tour in it anymore was pretty hillarious. Overbuilt tele-gear = skiing's answer to the spork.

The only problem with this is that the these people who were opposing the war were allegedly accepting bribes to keep someone like Hussein in power - something that was completely at odds with the welfare of the Iraqi people. Not sure why this should be considered moral - unless you were consider any use of force under any circumstances to be immoral - which very few people do. Opposed to taking arms against Hitler? Moral. Opposed to the use of force to thwart the carnage in Bosnia and Kosovo? Moral again. The axiom that being opposed to any war at any time is the moral thing to do doesn't always jive very well with reality. When I read things like your last sentence I can only conclude that you believe that there is a sinister cabal of people sitting at the boards of various companies who were able to get all of Congress, the British Parliament, Jose Aznar et al in Europe, everyone in the Pentagon, everyone in the British Armed Forces, etc, etc, etc - to wage a war for their sole benefit and pull off the said conspiracy in such a manner that none of the thousands of people involved in such an enterprise would ever talk to the press, never slip, never attract the attention of opposition parties or critics of the war, had confidence that they would be able to predict every move that the notoriously predictable Saddam Hussein would make at least a year in advance and know for certain that he'd play cat-and-mouse games with the inspectors rather than capitulate, etc, etc, etc -but feel free to correct me if I am off base here. In any event, point me to some credible evidence that any of the companies involved in reconstruction bribed officials in return for initiating the drive to war or using their office to register support for the same and that last sentence will have some basis in fact. Until then it's Grassy Knoll stuff and nothing more.

That tidbit was just one guy's perspective, of which there are of course many in Iraq. It's roughly consisitent with opinion poll data coming out of Iraq concerning these issues, and if you take a look at the random feedback sites like the BBC most Iraqis post opinions about these issues that are in marked contrast to their Western counterparts. This is one such case. One other reason I posted that guy's comments to make people aware of the fact that there are a few Iraqis out there posting info on the day-to-day realities on the ground in Iraq - something people pretended to care about before the war but have now largely been abandoned as a rallying cry for those opposed to it. Largely puts to rest the notion that the majority opposed to the war did so out of concern for the wellbeing of the Iraqi people. As far as this proto-scandal is concerned, the individuals allegedly accepted direct bribes from the regime in return for the cultivation of international support for the regime, and they duly did everything in their power to thwart the US and Britain's efforts to remove the regime by force. The only way that these charges would have an equivalent in the US/Brittain was if documents surfaced that revealed that individuals or organizations that stood to profit from the invasion of Iraq payed officials in the administration bribes with the agreement that the recipients would do everything in their power to cultivate support for prosecuting a war. There is currently no evidence to support such allegations, and there are currently no serious people engaged in efforts to make the case that any such thing actually occured - which is certainly an oddity if there are actually grounds for such charges given that it's an election year and there's an off chance that exposing such things might tilt the odds in the Democrat's favor just a bit. And now we have an outcry over corruption on the part of those who prosecuted the war in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, and evidence of corruption in those who opposed the war with no outcry whatsoever. Interesting.

Also interesting to note the number of people who have worked themselves into a lather about the supposed corruption of the Bush administration's distribution of contracts to Halliburton et al in the absence of any evidence whatsoever - yet have remained silent after a story identifying scores of individuals associated with nations/groups opposed to the war have been identified as direct recipients of bribes from the regime in documents seized after the war. Time will tell whether or not these documents are legitimate or forgeries, but the discrepancy in the responses has been telling. "Wednesday January 28, 2004 12:01 AM By JAMAL HALABY Associated Press Write AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - Arabs and Westerners accused by Iraqis of receiving Iraqi oil proceeds in exchange for supporting Saddam Hussein denied Tuesday they had accepted bribes or participated in illicit deals. The accusations surfaced this week in a report by one of the dozens of new newspapers that have begun publishing in Iraq since Saddam was ousted last March. Since, members of the new provisional Iraqi government and Saddam opponents have distributed a list of the accused, based on documents from the Iraqi Oil Ministry. About 270 former Cabinet officials, legislators, political activists and journalists from 46 countries are on the list, suspected of profiting from Iraqi oil sales that Saddam had allegedly offered them in exchange for cultivating political and popular support in their countries. In Jordan, former parliament member Toujan Faisal, who is on the list, said she never took Iraqi bribes, but had served as an intermediary between the Iraqi government and an Jordan-based oil dealer. ``I wanted to help this dealer who happened to be a good of friend of mine do business in Iraq,'' she told The Associated Press...." Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3676654,00.html