JayB

You haven't lived, as a bike commuter in Seattle, until one of your fellow cyclists rolls up to you at an intersection and delivers the same sermon. Seems like most motorists that deliver those lines are more than happy to see you grinding up a hill at 5mph on the sidewalk instead of obstructing traffic...

Compared to what? If I'm not mistaken, Canada is seeing something like one private clinic opening per week in the wake of the supreme court ruling that overturned the rules that forced doctors and patients into the public system. Also, the UK has started relaxing the restrictions on patients who want to bypass the restrictions on treatments, medications, etc by paying the difference between the care they want and what the government is prepared to pay for. Both indicate a movement away from, rather than towards, a strict single-payer modality - which moves them closer to the models that prevail in most of Europe and elsewhere. Quick overview of the German system: http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/bb3Germany.php

Neither life expectancy, nor infant mortality, nor preventable deaths are actually good measures of how well the health care system that we have treats a given medical condition vs the rest of the world. Ditto for the WHO report - which I invite you to read and carefully examine the methodology they used to rank health care systems. I've provided the links, data, and arguments before at length - but it's worth repeating the following. What constitutes a live birth that gets counted in infant mortality stats vary widely from country to country. The fact that the US has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world has much more to do with the relative stringency of our standards for counting very premature or sick babies as live births than it does with any deficiencies that we have in caring for them. Life expectancy stats that purport to measure how well the health-care system works have to account for deaths from murders, suicides, accidents, and variations in lifestyle to generate meaningful feedback about mortality that the health system can actually do something about. Ditto for preventable deaths. Preventable by what? Smoke heavily, drink heavily, overeat and sit on your ass for thirty years straight and there's not a hell of a lot that any doctor can do to spare you from the consequences of your actions. And finally - there's cost. Let's break down the per-capita spending stats in terms of voluntary vs elective care, covered vs out of pocket spending and see where that gets us instead of simply taking "total medical spending" and dividing by population. Do the numbers indicate that people in the US spend more because they can, because they have to, or some combination of both? Having said all of that - I have no problem with a "public option" provided that it doesn't rig the game against private insurers. The following is most of a letter that I've been sending to republican senators. "One mechanism for insuring that legislation which provides for a "public option" that doesn't unfairly rig the game against private insurers would be a provision that mandates equal income-indexed government funding for public and private plans. Allow me to illustrate what that phrase means by way of a concrete example. Let's suppose that under the rules governing a "public option" an individual making $50,000 per year would qualify for a government sponsored health insurance plan with total costs equal to $10,000 per year, provided that he or she paid in income-indexed premium. For the sake of this example, let's assume that the premium for such an individual would be $2,000. So, the individual pays $2,000 and the government pays the remaining $8,000. Under "equal income indexed government funding," the government would be required to grant the same individual the option to accept $8,000 per year in tax-credits or direct subsidies to apply towards a private medical insurance policy of his or her choosing. In short, the government would be required to make same investment in their health care, whether they opted for private or public coverage. Failure to do so would make for unfair competition between the government and private insurance companies and would unfairly favor people enrolled in public plans over those enrolled in private plans. If the choice is between paying $2,000 a year and getting access to benefits worth $10,000 a year, and paying $2,000 a year and getting access to benefits worth...$2,000 a year (or any amount less than $10,000) it's not terribly difficult to predict which plan the public will want to join under such lopsided "competition." Rules that mandated a neutral allocation of government resources between public and private plans would also force the health care delivery system organized under the public plan to compete in terms of value and quality. The only way for the public option to prevail in a competition organized under such rules would be to provide superior care at a lower price per out-of-pocket dollar. This - of course - is entirely consistent with the stated rationale for providing a public option in the first place. Consequently, including such a rule in the legislation would appeal to the motives of those who sincerely believe that a public plan is the best mechanism by which to deliver the best care at the lowest price, and expose the motives of those who are intent on using a public plan as a mechanism to to drive private insurers out of business and thereby bring about a single-payer regime by default." Would all of you single-payer fans find such a compromise acceptable? If not - why not?

Just curious, what climbing area is that? Reasonable question given that this is a climbing forum, but I was referring to attitudes towards helmets in whitewater kayaking so "the river" = a river.

Well, that’s just one statement by Ayers that, in principle, one could agree with although it does not justify his particular course of action of criminality. But the real question is what is more criminal? Now, I condemn violence as the solution because most commonly there is a corresponding backlash that does not address the aggrieving condition but instead serves to perpetuate it. Governments have been accused of actually inviting these actions as an excuse to clamp down; something called the “strategy of tension”. I do, however, question the assumption that only legal, non-violent means are necessary in all cases involving liberal societies where essential liberties are publicly proclaimed. Sometimes society requires a nudge in a particular direction. For instance, civil disobedience requires breaking the law to show others the injustice of a particular societal framework. Now also, what is violent depends to some extent on who is making that determination. If the authority structure is threatened by direct action then most likely that action will be defined as violent, therefore, it is aberrant and pathological. Paradoxically though, sickness can be a way to a higher health. But you’re right; the common man should stick to the tried and true ways of seeking and maintaining a virtuous society. If we were confining our discussion to abstractions, there's quite a bit of what you've written that I might agree with. However, the fact that we're talking about concrete realities here means that I have to confess that I don't think that it's possible to mount a defense of Ayers by reference to non-existent infringements of his liberties that he wasn't actually subject to. Much less with recourse to considerations of how governments that he wasn't living under might distort the meaning of the word "violence" to include virtually any action that they pleased. Ditto for equating non-violent civil disobedience with anything that would satisfy conventional definitions of violence. We're talking about a white, college educated baby-boomer living in the US in the 1970's here. Ayers had recourse to the full spectrum of constitutionally protected rights and liberties, which were more than sufficient to enable him and others like minded folks make their case and persuade the public to adopt their beliefs, policy ambitions, etc as their own and vote accordingly. These liberties weren't merely proclaimed, they were matters of political fact. The fact that they opted for physical violence was a frank concession of the fact that they saw an uncrossable gulf between what they wanted and what they could persuade their fellow citizens to support. I'm not sure if planting bombs was a sincere attempt to bridge that chasm with violence, or simply a violent temper-tantrum directed at a society that refused to do as he told. His primary claim to virtue, so far as I can tell, is the fact that he didn't personally kill anyone and it's debatable whether mercy or ineptitude played the greater role in that, IMO.

Loaners, my man, loaners. They're still on the to-read list, but realistically it'll be a while before they're on deck. The cartage is no problem, since I'll be lugging down a kayak and some fly-fishing gear for the weekend, but you'd have to swear on the plaster-of-paris-with-wine-spouting-stigmata that I'd be able to get them back when you've finished with them. If you're hurting for an immediate fix to fill the lurch, take a look at the preface to Johnson's dictionary. While in Australia my wife and I spent some time staying with a confirmed bibliophile who, naturally had a copy of Johnson's dictionary on his shelves, and I whiled away a very enjoyable morning reading through it. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/preface.html

These days showing up at the river without a helmet would go over about as well as rolling up to the first tee at a golf-course with no pants. Just isn't done. Back to climbing and helmets, though, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned some of the many other potential uses that helmets have in addition to protecting your head. Shovel, seat, the applications are endless. I remember getting worked so badly on a slightly overhanging OW called "Quivering Quill" at Turkey Rocks that I attempted to "place" my helmet in a constriction to cop a rest. Very bad idea - and in hindsight I was glad that my brief foray into the realm of "helmet aid" was a very short-lived failure. Also - going to cast a vote against the "look-up" strategy as a default when you hear rockfall and/or "Rock!"

I'll be in Portland for the weekend and can drop off all 11 volumes and 8-10K pages worth of the Durant's "Story of Civilization" series if you want to keep the binge going. Read "The Age of Voltaire" from the series back in ~96 and enjoyed it so much that I picked up the rest of the collection when I could find them as used bookstores. Just unearthed them from storage after the Homeric 10-year WA-->CO-->WA-->MA-->NZ-->WA migration cycle and have some other stuff in the queue at the moment.

Regarding self-immolation, as Bill Ayers Ted Kaczynski states in Fugitive Days "Industrial Society and Its Future," "You could not be a moral person with the means to act, and stand still. [...] To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral." Arguments like Ayers' self-justifying pap fall short in liberal societies where essential freedoms like freedom of speech and assembly have robust institutional protections and citizens have the capacity to effect political changes through voting and a gazillion other legal, non-violent means.

Seriously - what, exactly, is defensible here? This business that being involved in rescue and body-retrieval renders you exempt from basic standards of human decency is a bit much.

Capitol Hill293E Blaine St between Lakeview Blvd E and 10th Ave E These take you more or less from the top of Capitol hill to ~ 50 feet above the water level if you continue down past the public mountain bike park.

If the message that casual readers of this thread take home is that the Bend features nothing but chossy, overgrown mank, then...hooray.

No, I'd be "okay" with giving welfare to corporate vampires masquerading as health-care providers if it would get everybody health care, but I wouldn't be "cool" with it. As far as determining who gets what, I would think it entirely appropriate for the government to set guidelines as to what standard level of coverage would mean in a taxpayer funded health care program. Hayekian boogeymen aside, what's the problem here? If we're talking about guidelines in a strict numerical sense, in the way that they're applied to mandatory minimums in auto insurance, there are no problems per se. That, however, depends entirely on what the people making the rules deem to be an acceptable standard of coverage. In practice, the most problematic unintended consequences of the government calling the shots here are rent-seeking from interest groups and the adverse-selection problem that this leads to. What that means in practice is that everyone from feng-shui practitioners to psychiatrists wants the state to make coverage for their services mandatory in order to protect their incomes, and this drives up the price of insurance for everyone. Relatively healthy people who need health-insurance (and could afford the inflated premuim), rather than a prepaid healthcare plan with annual out-of pocket limits, do the math and decide their better off not paying thousands of dollars a year for services that they don't use. Others are simply priced out of the market and take their chances. This sickest people stay in, the rest bail out, and this drives the price of insurance higher. The concentric price-exclusion spiral goes higher. The typical response from state legislators who see this happening is to eliminate low cost, catastrophic plans and force anyone who wants to protect themselves against the worst consequences of ill-health into kitchen-sink style plans. This doesn't happen in every state, and could easily be remedied by simply allowing people to buy health insurance offered in any state in the US. That is, allowing for regulatory competition between states would provide a mechanism to counter the regulatory problems that I outlined above. You could also counter this problem by outlawing private healthcare and forcing everyone into a government plan. I've already made quite a few posts on the hazards of doing so, and probably won't have the time or energy to restate what I've said before, but you are welcome to avail yourself of the search bar and scroll away if you wish.

so, besides once more falsely claiming that I want to grant government the power to eliminate anything I disagree with where did you actually address what I said? Was the "address what I said" in question this comment: "...making sure that people aren't the captives of snake oil salesmen who create needs by manipulating people emotions." Or the one where you asked me to cite abridgments of civil liberties that had their genesis in times of conflict and war that were subsequently remedied when the crisis had passed. It's a worrisome tendency, but the track record shows that the country has recovered its bearings pretty quickly and has restored the civil liberties that were compromised. In other matters - ranging from the War on Drugs to agricultural subsidies - there's much less cause for optimism. Hint: The most recent post was in response to your "snake oil" post where you stated a desire for the government an unnamed entity to protect people people from the desires that satan and his many foul minions lawful advertising of legal products might cultivate within them. The previous post was in response to this comment: "..what isn't permanent in the loss of civil liberties? the legacy of the red scare and its neutering of the opposition? the spying on peace groups? etc ... I think you are delusional."

Awesome. Thanks for sharing

I'll just chime in and say that I ran into Tony and his crew at the columns a few years ago, and had a totally different experience. No problem working it out on lines that his group and ours wanted to climb, nice attitudes all around, etc.

the world wide economy cratering, people losing jobs by the millions, pensions, homes is everyday realities? what a joke! what isn't permanent in the loss of civil liberties? the legacy of the red scare and its neutering of the opposition? the spying on peace groups? etc ... I think you are delusional. When it comes to liberties forfeited for the prospect of greater security, I'm specifically thinking of the Alien and Sedition Acts during the undeclared naval conflict with France in 1798, Lincoln suspending Habeus Corpus during the Civil War, The Espionage and Sedition Acts during WW1, Japanese internment during WWII, etc. All were remedied by an appeal to founding principles after the risks and/or the public perception of them waned. Yes, you clearly weren't thinking about policies both official and unofficial that have been around for a long time. BS. This is the quote you cited: "The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, American campuses, and the disgusting U.N. Human Rights Council) what you’re permitted to say and think." it is true that it is broader debate but you applied this notion to government participation in GM and invoked the "nagging difficulties of every life" (paraphrase) to address the response to an economic and environmental crisis of catastrophic proportions. And again (what is it 3rd or 4th time I have to explain to you?) it isn't a question of "constraining the temptation to buy a given product" but of making sure that people aren't the captives of snake oil salesmen who create needs by manipulating people emotions. I'd agree that snake-oil, meaning a factual claim that one can objectively prove to be fraudulent, is something that government should (and in most cases already does) subject to various sanctions. I hope that this means that you've already written your legislators imploring them to apply the same evidentiary standards to homeopathy and other alternative modalities that they apply to pharmaceuticals and scientific medical practice. However, it seems as though the dream-world that you conjure up in bits and pieces via your posts here would include a definition of snake-oil that's far broader than empirically testable fraud claims. One can't help but get the impression that snake-oil consists of any class of desires, pursuits, interests, hobbies, ideas, interests, diversions, etc that's at odds with your own particular conception of what's socially beneficial. Most of us dislike particular aspects of the society we live in, other people's opinions, etc. That's one thing, but wanting to grant the state the power to eliminate anything that deviates from our personal conception of what's permissible is completely at odds with everything about the liberal tradition, and marks the spot where the statist "progressives" and religious fundamentalists of various stripes start staking out some overlapping turf. People have been lying, cheating, stealing, gambling, whoring, drinking, overeating, idling, etc from the dawn of the species onwards. Religious fundamentalists are convinced that they need to get their hands on the levers of power to drive satan out of everyone's lives, and leftists of a particular strip are reaching for the same levers for the same reasons - to keep people from making the "wrong" choices. In this case, it's not the devil that's making people do it - it's...marketing and/or the aggregate of individual choices that we commonly refer to as "the market."

Yeah, I mean Nazi Germany only lasted what, 10 or 12 years? National health care for every American could throw us into another dark age lasting centuries! Let's not pretend that a scheme that gave every American a voucher sufficient to purchase comprehensive coverage from private insurers is something that you'd be cool with. After all, under such a scheme, private medical spending wouldn't be outlawed, and people would still be free to spend money on acne cream, boob-jobs, tooth-whitening, LASIK, and whatever else they deemed important and valuable by their own lights. Yes, let's take the focus away from your dumb original point for a moment. Given the ongoing track record of our corporate "citizens" and the single-minded focus of the health care industry on profit-taking, giving them corporate welfare to sustain the idiotic procedures you mentioned and subsidizing the R&D for the next great discovery in making old men's weenies hard again is decidedly not "something I'd be cool with". So we agree that for you it's not about everyone having health-care, it's about the government determining the minute details of who gets what health-care. Thanks for clearing that up.

Looks like the unnamed climber in question here was Aaron Koester, of Monroe Washington. http://cms.firehouse.com/web/online/News/Washington-Firefighter-Loses-Life-Climbing-On-Mount-Rainier/46113 "And Mankato is right, it's too bad that a terribly inaccurate and insensitive picture was portrayed for the family and friends of the deceased climber." Agreed. I can't claim to know anything about what transpired on the mountain, but if FTY's version is accurate, the real mystery is why someone would *invent* a scenario that paints such an incredibly unfortunate portrait of themselves for the explicit purpose of sharing it with the rest of the world.

Yeah, I mean Nazi Germany only lasted what, 10 or 12 years? National health care for every American could throw us into another dark age lasting centuries! Let's not pretend that a scheme that gave every American a voucher sufficient to purchase comprehensive coverage from private insurers is something that you'd be cool with. After all, under such a scheme, private medical spending wouldn't be outlawed, and people would still be free to spend money on acne cream, boob-jobs, tooth-whitening, LASIK, and whatever else they deemed important and valuable by their own lights.

the world wide economy cratering, people losing jobs by the millions, pensions, homes is everyday realities? what a joke! what isn't permanent in the loss of civil liberties? the legacy of the red scare and its neutering of the opposition? the spying on peace groups? etc ... I think you are delusional. When it comes to liberties forfeited for the prospect of greater security, I'm specifically thinking of the Alien and Sedition Acts during the undeclared naval conflict with France in 1798, Lincoln suspending Habeus Corpus during the Civil War, The Espionage and Sedition Acts during WW1, Japanese internment during WWII, etc. All were remedied by an appeal to founding principles after the risks and/or the public perception of them waned. I clearly wasn't arguing that the loss of civil liberties can't be permanent, or that that's not a risk that we should be acutely aware of. What I was arguing was that, per policies like those embodied in the War on Drugs, liberty-for-security exchanges that have their basis in less dramatic restrictions of personal freedom in response to permanent, everyday realities like addiction, etc are more likely to persist indefinitely. And, it's not as though the desire for the state to annex responsibility for everything from sobriety to whether or not consenting adults can exchange sex for money, to constraining the temptation to buy a given product represents something entirely novel that's come about suddenly in response to this particular economic crisis, despite your claims to the contrary. I couldn't help but think of you when I read the following passage: The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers...

Hopefully someone in the GOP will avail themselves of the opportunity to categorically denounce this guy, the networks and organizations that provided the ideological home-base for this guy, and to distance themselves from Christian wack-jobs in general, but I'm not holding my breath. Something about losing the contest of ideas at the ballot box seems to make a good fraction of the losing party lose their collective shit. Could be a recent phenomenon, but I suspect that it's been with us for as long as we've had political parties. The dusk of the Truthers brings us the dawn of the Nirthers...

There's more than one way to make that exchange, no? There's an inherent tension between the desire for liberty and security that prompts everyone to make concessions, but I'd argue that exchanges made on behalf of national security in times of war or when the country in question is under attack in some fashion - however regrettable - are less likely to be permanently compromise liberty than the desire to be protected and insulated from the everyday realities that can make life uncertain and hard even in the best of times. At least I'd like to think that it's the more brutal everyday realities that tempt people to make such exchanges that lead us to policies like, say, prohibition. I can understand how watching a heroin addict someone destroy themselves and make life hell for everyone around them would bring about a desire to have the government step in and make drugs disappear. I'm not sure what to make of people who find the prospect of having manufacturers say flattering things about their products - all of which have to comply with government standards for safety, etc - so terrifying that they want to hide under the government blankie, lest temptation get the better of them and they come home with a box of Calgon Bath Crystals that they really didn't need. All of which makes DeTocqueville's comments on "What Sort of Despotism that Democratic Nations Have to Fear," in "Democracy in America" all the more prescient. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits. After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.... Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity." Read the Whole Chapter...

I can only hope that the brevity of the above retort was occasioned by the demands of sending letter-after-letter to the Obama administration to hold them to account. Military tribunals! Rendition! State Secrets! Telecom Immunity! Et...........cetera.

For some reason, Michael Moore made me think of something I read recently: "When President Bush used to promote the notion of democracy in the Muslim world, there was a line he liked to fall back on: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Are you quite sure? It’s doubtful whether that’s actually the case in Gaza and Waziristan, but we know for absolute certain that it’s not in Paris and Stockholm, London and Toronto, Buffalo and New Orleans. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, American campuses, and the disgusting U.N. Human Rights Council) what you’re permitted to say and think."