JayB

Here's to hoping that the return of one long-loster will bring back another... http://www.geocities.ws/extremomtdude/

I always preferred foam helmets for cragging, where my main concern was my head impacting a fixed object, and old-school helmets for lower angle alpine terrain where my main concern was getting hit by a rock. I only have one data point for the old-school helmets, but in that case a rock in the baseball-softball sized range tagged me just above the forehead with enough force to knock me clean off of my feet, and the helmet suspension straps left a bruises on my head that lasted for several days - but I don't recall any other injuries other than a mild headache that lasted for the rest of the day. In that particular case I felt like a big part of the reason that the damage wasn't worse was due to the fact that the helmet's rigid, and fairly slick surface deflected most of the energy rather than absorbing it.

I have to confess I'm frankly puzzled by the assertion that there's anything in our collective national ideals, either as they are formally recorded in the Constitution/Bill of Rights/etc or informally understood as a set of informal norms that exists in some sort of ideological ether that obliges us to uncritically accept the proposition that we should grant any particular nation unfettered access to the most lethal weaponry ever devised by man - much less states that are unstable, hostile, totalitarian, or any combination of the three. Can you spell out what actual/tangible principles that you are referring to here that we're violating here? Do these principles apply if we're at war with these same states? What if we have legitimate concerns about their ability to secure them, that they'll be used for etc, etc, etc. How about weapons-systems that we developed but not longer maintain? We developed field-deployable chemical weapons systems. Who are we to deny anyone else the right to develop them and use them as they see fit just because we have chosen to decommission them? I think that even if Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine spawned a supernatural love-child composed of pure-ideology and had it mate with the collective utopian id hovering over Woodstock the supernatural being hatched from that pairing would scrutinize the idea proposition that our ideals oblige us to grant Iran unfettered access to nukes and say "Huh?" - but I'm willing to hear you out.

Thanks - that was interesting. My three second take is that you are a nihilist in theory but a utilitarian pragmatist in practice. I think that'a fine as a personal philosophy, even if the parts don't fit together - but I'm glad that it's generally been utilitarian types who have a chauvinistic partiality towards liberal western values rather than equalitarian nihilists that have had their hands on the red button. As an aside, one of the practical reasons that I oppose proliferation is that I think that the states that are most eager to get their hands on nukes these days have (correctly) concluded that all modern/liberal/western societies are no longer ruthless enough to go tit-for-tat in an ICBM exchange, much less retaliate in kind in the event of a nuke transferred from a hostile regime and set off in the Port of Long Beach by any of the non-state actors out to bring down the Great Satan. There are lots of reasons for that, and I think that's a very concrete sign of moral progress, but the days when a chap like Curtis LeMay is calling shots that can immolate entire cities with the public behind him is long behind us. Even if they decided not to target us for whatever reason, I have much less confidence that the principle of strategic deterrence will stay the hands of the folks running the show in the Gulf States, Pakistan, etc - for a variety of reasons. Anyhow - I have my own requirement for determining who gets to have nukes, which is the capacity to effectively design, build, and maintain a modern sewage system capable of handling 1/3 of their total output of caca without any foreign material or technical assistance. It's more of a necessary requirement than a sufficient one, but I find it frightening that there are already countries with nukes that fall short of that standard.

Sorry for the reverse thread drift, but the "Who are we to oppose country X getting nukes when we have them?" has always fascinated me, so I have a few questions. The least head-scratching argument for this position is that the logic of deterrence will hold no matter what the ideology or motives of the people who run the state. Is that your main argument? Even if you accept that proposition for the sake of argument, does the stability of the regime and the capacity to secure the weapons have any bearing on this position? The more exotic form of the argument from equality is that - hey, we're a state, and we have nukes - and they're a state, so it follows from that we have no legitimate basis for wanting to deny them access to nuclear weapons. Even if you play along and accept this premise, that still leaves room to inquire about the standard that should be used to grant access to the nuke-club. Does the state have to exist for a certain period of time, contain a certain number of souls, abides by a certain standard of behavior, command a certain number of square miles in order for this standard to apply, or does any entity that self-identifies as a state qualify under the "we're a state, they're a state, we have nukes, ergo...." argument"? If you are a committed nihilist, then I think it's possible to construct an argument that is logically consistent with the premise that there can never be any legitimate basis for denying any entity that self identifies as a state access to nukes, but as soon as you declare that a particular value or outcome is preferable to another, then you have a solid utilitarian argument for wanting to deny nukes to whichever state wants to use them to advance the stuff that you've conceded is worse than an alternative. E.g. if a state declares that humanity is a scourge to the planet and they've stated their intent to use nukes to kill off the human race, including themselves, and have a special breed of genetically engineered howler monkeys that they've bred for the job take over, as soon as you concede that plan is at least modestly less desirable than *not* killing off ~7 billion souls, and/or unlikely to be realized in practice, then there's your argument for keeping their hands off of the red button, no? Or is this just something that you haven't spent much time thinking about? That would make more sense to me, but if you actually have a defense of the "argument from equality" as it pertains to nukes chambered away in your noggin, I'd be interested to hear what it is.

That's very helpful feedback that I'll give every bit of consideration that the author's standing as a practitioner of both arts warrants. Having said that, may I say that I'm personally *very* disappointed to see that you overlooked this opportunity to highlight the many obvious connections that your personal engagement in civil rights advocacy - including, but not limited to giving presentations to high-school students - and all of the insights derived therein have given you into the civic history of late 20th century Somalia in general and the role that the communist military coup in particular played in the genesis of that history in particular. They're every bit as clear as the other pretexts that have been used for that purpose in the past, so I hope that you'll re-think your reticence to call attention to them and commence pointing them out, post haste.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as research or not, but if you're interested in the topic you can score a used copy of Michael Maren's book on Amazon for a penny + shipping. I can't say it'll be an enjoyable read, but I found it engrossing and illuminating when I read it ~15 years ago. It deals more with the unintended consequences of funneling fungible goods into a tribal/civil war-zone than precisely how Somalia devolved from a patch of her Brittanic Majesty's turf where you could enjoy high tea on a veranda overlooking the sea to a squalid hell-hole of the highest caliber in ~10 years, but it covers the broad strokes of the events that catalyzed the civil war, and it's fair to say that the classical liberalism espoused by the likes of Friedman and Hayek had little or no influence on the folks who presided over that endeavor.

"5) Jay, you got time for another 10 second psychoanalysis session?" Well - since we'll never meet in person if I play my cards right, I'll never be able to resolve the performance-art vs personality disorder paradox. I hope that it's all just an act or an example of a particularly extreme gap between an online persona and the real life person (such was the case with our beloved Crazy Polish Bob). And, hey - there are parts of the performance that I always find amusing. For instance whenever a random topic somehow gets tethered to civil rights advocacy, literally apropos of absolutely nothing - I either think of the Monty Python skit where the answer to every question is "Pork," or this scene in the Big Lebowski. Walter Sobchak: Those rich fucks! This whole fucking thing... I did not watch my buddies die face down in the muck so that this fucking strumpet... The Dude: I don't see any connection to Vietnam, Walter. Walter Sobchak: Well, there isn't a literal connection, Dude. The Dude: Walter, face it, there isn't any connection."

I think 2008 was just an intentional scam from the top down. They intentionally gave out loans to unqualified people with ARM's. They knew these loans would go bad when rates went up. They bundled these bad loans and fraudulently graded them AAA. Somewhere in the process they multiplied things with derivatives. Then they sold the bad bundles to unwitting investors, at the same time betting against them, betting that they would go bad. Then they raised rates and watched their plan go through. Then when all the sh*t hit the fan they had the unmitigated gall to ask for a taxfunded "bailout" for the banks they were involved with that had taken a hit. The bailout bill failed the first time it went through congress. Partly due to the fact the American public contacted their representatives in record numbers. It actually broke the record for citizen contact with representatives. 95% of them asking congress not to bailout the banks. The bankers came back threatening the reps with martial law if they didn't give them the bill and the bunch of pu**ies caved. All this was allowed by de-regulation. Instead of breaking laws they just got rid of them. But even that was not enough and they did break laws and commit crimes. While the Raygoon admin convicted about 1000 bankers in the S&L scandal of the '80s the Obama "justice" department has convicted zero bankers in this scandal. Although recently they have levied some fines, which are of course pennies on the dollar, a mere fee for criminal activity. -I suppose that's one way to look at it, but your post bring the phrase "never assume a conspiracy when simple incompetence will do." That - and "Devil Take the Hindmost..."is always the rule when it comes to debt-fueled speculative mania. Read up on the tears and recriminations that followed after the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles if you get the chance. -It seems like you've got enough interest in the topic to devour all of the book length tomes on the topic. I'm not sure they'd change your mind, but you'd probably find them interesting all the same. Ditto for "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" or any other book on the history of speculative manias. -Some - I'd say most - of the guys who made a killing on the bust had more luck than smarts on their side. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" is normally the rule of the day when it comes to taking short positions. Lots of people with lots of money looked at the fundamentals in the US RE market, shorted the bejesus out of banks, mortgage originators, etc - and got eaten alive then the speculative mania kept the party going and the price of the stocks they'd shorted kept going up. The lunacy going on in the Canadian property market as had people have been shorting Canadian banks for years with zero payoff. I'm sure that there will be a handful of people that look like geniuses when that cycle corrects, too - and no one will think about all of the people who made bets against that market with no payoff, either.

Early 90's on the toxic dumping and illegal fishing by foreign vessels. So I guess it can't be said it was the cause of the collapse but really a symptom afterwards, and now a reason for the piracy. http://www.projectcensored.org/3-toxic-waste-behind-somali-pirates/ I would have voted for Ron Paul because he was less of a tool than the other corporate puppets. Agree on drugs, corporate subsidies, the Fed, disagree on administrative regulation and privatization. The reason for the banking collapse of 2008 was de-regulation. Imagine playing a game with no rules, or a highway with no laws. Take away the rules and regulations and you get chaos. Some businesses are better off being public, usually the ones that are inherent monopolies. Like the power grid, water, phone and cable lines. Why is Comcast one of the most hated companies? They have a monopoly on hi speed internet, so they don't have to care and can charge whatever. It costs 2 to 3 times as much to send a package via UPS or FedEx compared to the post office, because the post office is not for profit. The predatory capitalists just want the profitable part of the business, they will leave the rural delivery to USPS. They also pay their workers sh*t compared to the post office. A USPS job is a high living wage where you can almost afford to have a one wage earner household and a stay at home parent which means much better kids. So here's the comparison. USPS, way lower rates, high pay to the 98%, nothing for the 1%. Private, higher rates, low pay to the 98%, obscene wealth for the mother fu*king scumbag sh*tstain on the face of humanity greed pigs. The saga of the USPS is a long story. Established over many years it is now and I believe has always been self sustaining. When you deliver to all rural points it becomes an inherent monopoly because it would not be profitable to maintain more than one infrastructure that large. So now the private companies want to come in and pillage only the profitable part built up by someone else. Recently the main way this has been done is through Republifu*k sh*theads in congress where they have enacted a law requiring the post office to fund employee retirement 80 years into the future. This is ludicrous and no company has ever had to do this before. It's just a way to try to drive them to bankruptcy so they can take over their business. Well - looks like we agree on most of the stuff in the top paragraph. I don't entirely disagree with you when it comes to regulation. The part that I disagree with isn't because I think regulation is inherently bad, it's because regulation is a tough thing to get right, and the more complex the underlying process that you are trying to regulate is, the more likely you are to encounter unintended consequences. It's easy to lose sight of this these days, but most regulations in most commercial fields emerged via an evolutionary process involving lots of trial and error rather than being summoned from the ether by an omnipotent bureaucrat/dictator/legislature/etc issuing a top-down diktat. Most of the regulations that emerge from this sort process are field tested at a small scale and only spread and persist if they worked. The "regulations" that NW tribes (once) used to regulate how much of the salmon they harvested every year are an example of this kind of "emergent" regulation. Back when banking was an entirely private enterprise, and when the bank officers stood to have their banks go bust and lose everything they owned if they made bad loans, the regulations that governed banking were the product of a similar process. It's been a long time since "free" banking existed - mostly because kings didn't like having to ask banks to borrow money for wars, castles, etc- but if you look around you can see examples where banks were primarily governed by rules that evolved over centuries were more robust than those that were subject to top-down regulations created by "intelligent design." There are lots of examples of top-down regulations in banking that were well intentioned but made the system more fragile. The ban on "branch banking" was a great way to protect local banks from competition, but made it impossible for them to diversify their loan base enough to ride out local crop failures, etc. Government deposit insurance is a good way to prevent small-scale bank runs and nominally protect the little guy, but it increases systemic risk in the banking system and virtually all of the insurance benefit goes to the people with the most money. Mandating that bank reserves be AAA sounds good in practice, but it creates a "monoculture" of bank reserves, creates an incentive to stuff crappy debt into "AAA" packaging, and reduces the banks' incentive to evaluate the quality of the securities that they use for reserves, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.....blah. Then there's also regulatory capture, incentives to use the political process to secure special exemptions from the rules that are applied to competitors that foster corruption, whether the regulations create incentives that will overpower the rules,etc, etc, etc, etc. All of which is an overly long way of saying that regulations aren't inherently good or bad, and I don't think that's a very useful framework to use when evaluating a policies, political agendas, etc. In the case of the GFC - there's lots of blame to go around, but I don't think you can tell the whole story without looking into the role that the Fed's rate cuts had on boosting home prices, the regs that created more demand for AAA securities that actually existed, pension funds desperate for yield, the various "top-down" regulations that undermined loan quality....all the way down to the aggregate effect that the ethics/decisions that millions of individual Americans made that resulted in them taking on more debt and financial risk than they could afford.

NPD

When I bother to respond to you these days, I have to confess that I find myself a bit conflicted. 90% of me is convinced that most, if not all of your responses here are part of a deeeeeep performance art project where you impersonate someone with a profound and totally uncompensated AxisII disorder (NPD would be my first guess), undertaken with a level of intensity and commitment that makes Jaoquin Phoenix's efforts look like a 4-line bit in a Sunday school play by comparison. Then there's a 10%-or-less of me that is worried that I might be engaging with an authentic representation of your true self, and that you are in the grips of a lifelong and hitherto un-managed personality disorder, and get the same sort of quasi-guilty feeling I'd get after from kidding around with someone for quite a while before realizing they're not in on the joke. Anyhow thanks for the 'splainer on strange-bedfellows, the state-of-civil-liberties-orgs update, and the fascinating non-sequitur on HIV.

1)Wait - you have some personal knowledge of a civil liberties organization?! Which one? Do tell. 2)"so many" vs "all". There's a distinction there.

-I get a chuckle out of the "Somalia as Libertarian Paradise" meme every time it comes up, mostly because no one who trots it out seems to know much about the history of Somalia - particularly the part where it only started descending into desolation and chaos after a Marxist/military coup took over the joint in ~1970. Well it didn't help when the predatory capitalists dumped toxins offshore of Somalia, and ruined the fishing for the locals, because it was the nearest unregulated place. Democracy, great in theory, so-so in practice Communism, so-so in theory, terrible in practice Libertarianism, terrible in theory, so bad in practice it's never really been tried. When did this toxin dumping happen? I'm not expert on Somalian history - I just remember a few details from reading Michael Maren's "The Road to Hell" - but IIRC Somalia was some kind of British protectorate until the early 1960's and transitioned into an independent or semi-independent entity that - whatever its faults - seemed to be reasonably orderly, at least by contemporary African standards. As far as libertarianism goes - the pure form is certainly utopian but I'm surprised that the ideological hostility to the creed has prevented so many left-of-center folks from making pragmatic alliances with libertarians on issues like drug prohibition, gay marriage, agricultural subsidies, etc. It's certainly fascinating to see people who identify with the ideological yearnings of the Woodstock-era left waaaaaaaaaay more than I ever will leaping to the defense of the centralized administrative state (e.g The Man) so often, much less invoking Somalia every time someone tables the idea of eliminating Davis Bacon or opening up mail service to private competition. Mogadishu in the 1960s:

E.g. does anyone really take issue with the idea that you can recognize that someone has all of the virtues that make someone an exceptional soldier with an outstanding service record, and acknowledge that a sincere love of country motivated their service ...and still think that that most or all of their ideas on policy are completely wrongheaded and would be disastrous for the country if they were implemented? nothing scares me more than a man w/ a True Belief in The Cause, whether that cause be god, king, country or cc.com the truth is, as your boy says, patriotism can very well be the refuge of a scoundrel - i don't doubt that timothy mcveigh and john wilkes booth were both patriots in their own hearts i think smedley butler was largely right in regards to the ulterior motives his service was set to, but that said, i'm not certain the world woulda been a rarer shade of blue if a different parcel of bitter-bastards had him as their slave -Heaven help us if humanity has to rely on people acting out of good motives alone to collect the garbage every week, much less make the world a better place. -There's lots more in to the Johnson essay than the bit about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. It may be the last refuge, but there's plenty of others to conceal base motives behind before they get there. Here's to hoping you get a chance to give it a read if you haven't yet.

-I get a chuckle out of the "Somalia as Libertarian Paradise" meme every time it comes up, mostly because no one who trots it out seems to know much about the history of Somalia - particularly the part where it only started descending into desolation and chaos after a Marxist/military coup took over the joint in ~1970.

E.g. does anyone really take issue with the idea that you can recognize that someone has all of the virtues that make someone an exceptional soldier with an outstanding service record, and acknowledge that a sincere love of country motivated their service ...and still think that that most or all of their ideas on policy are completely wrongheaded and would be disastrous for the country if they were implemented?

-Made me think of the oft-quoted and seldom read essay on the same subject. You ever get around to reading it? http://www.samueljohnson.com/thepatriot.html -Seems to me that you can recognize someone's virtues/service as a soldier without applauding whatever particular ideology they happen to promote as a civilian, much less concluding that whatever agenda they're advancing on the home front would prove beneficial to the country in any way if it were ever implemented. How often do you encounter actual people who take the contrary position?

"Never attempt to reason a man out of something he wasn't reasoned into." -Swift "Where's the omelette?" -Orwell

Holy Christ! Glad you're alive. Thanks for sharing.

-If you took a moment to describe the average level of experience that your group has with mountaineering in general and glacier travel in particular, it would probably help people here understand what aspects of the routes that you've chosen would fall into the category of hazards that are difficult to foresee, and what are simply standard realities of glacier travel.

Bob: That's a worthwile point, but the longer the thread stays active the more folks will see it so as long as the topics stay on something that's at least peripherally related I think a bit of thread drift will help rather than hurt. Jason: I have an inbox stretching back to infinity, so I was able to find the actual policies. The medical coverage was through IMG, but after doing a quick search it looks like there are at least a couple of other companies that offer something similar. I was just looking for something that a) didn't specifically exclude the stuff that we were most likely to get hurt doing and b) had enough coverage to cover at least 4-5 days of hospitalization and c) didn't cost a fortune. It "worked" in that I wasn't worried about what would happen if one of us was briefly hospitalized, but my only interaction with them involved filing out a form and sending them a check, so I'm not sure how they compare vs other companies. http://www.imglobal.com/en/img-insurance/adventure-sports-insurance/patriot-adventure-travel-medical-insurance.aspx I bought the medical evacuation coverage through medjet assist. There was a bit more info available from folks who actually had to use the service, since having a heart attack on a Cruize to Belize is way more common than, say, shattering your pelvis after taking a grounder in Tasmania - so from what I read it seemed like they were legit. https://medjetassist.com/ Probably total overkill for a weekend in Squamish, but might be worth looking into for trips that are longer/farther afield.

Very sorry to hear about Josh's predicament, but I'm glad that this information is getting out there. When we spent several months overseas and planned to spend some of our time in the outdoors doing stuff that might put us in a hospital, it seemed worth investing lots of hours in finding travel medical insurance that would cover emergency care if we got injured climbing, and medical evacuation insurance to fly us to a US hospital once we were stabilized enough to travel. I've never considered bothering with that for weekend trips to Canada since you'd spend almost as long searching and filling out forms as you would climbing, but I'll have to look into this a bit more and figure out if that's something I'll have to do in the future.

Which legislators are you talking about, specifically? I'm not disputing their existence, but the only Republicans that I can think of off of the top of my head that have been taking vocal anti-drone positions are guys like Rand Paul, who wasn't even in office when GWB was at the helm - and at least in Paul's case, seems to have been a non-interventionist for all of his adult life. Anyhow - is your claim here that only the right finds convenient excuses for violations of their ideals when they're part of the means to an end that they believe justifies them? Seems like that'd be a tough argument to carry very far unless we strike the entire history of of the left's, err...concessions...on behalf of various regimes pursuing collectivist ends to their logical conclusion from the time of Robespierre to the present, no?

I hadn't considered the possibility that both A and B would hold in this case - my bad. Anyhow - congrats on the presentations! Will the next lecture be "How to Make Logically Valid Inferences from Statistical Data - Or Why Cops in Washington *Really* Love Women, Asians, Seventh Day Adventists, Quadraplegics, The Blind, And Everyone Else With An Arrest Rate Lower Than Their Representation in the General Population."? Sorry - I keed, I keed. Back to less important matters.....