JayB

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."

F* - thanks for the reminder that your absence has been nice. You just can't seem to ever post without an unwarranted insult to others can you? Hey Bill: If the world was full of people that are as cool and loyal as you are, the world would be a much better place! Having said that, I wouldn't want you to rekindle the beef that you two had going on my behalf (if that's not what motivated the post, then please ignore this entire post) I'm sure that Pat's a fine fellow in person, and I find the rhetorical attention flattering. Besides, I'm sure that now that I'm back in Seattle for good, we'll almost surely run into each other at some point, so there's no sense in chalking any of our banter here up to more than differences of opinion that manifest themselves in more caustic and snarky ways online than they would over a beer. Besides, I rarely if ever talk seriously about politics or religion in person with folks who aren't close friends already (never sparred with people until I was reasonably certain that they wouldn't go nuts if you caught them with a good shot when we used to have gloves around, either, for the same reasons), so there's a reasonable chance that if we'd met elsewhere the now long-standing back-and-forth would never have started. *Ooops - I just assumed that Tvash's reply was directed at me, but after looking at the quote-chain again, I see that I was mistaken! Never mind and please excuse my presumption!

Most likely it's both. There is no question MANY are our enemies. Some are innocent and some are guilty. Sorting that out is a hard row to hoe no doubt. Assuming MOST of these yahoos are guilty and are our enemies, then what? Are they imprisoned for life with no trial? Are those who are innocent then also imprisoned for life? It ain't the American way. Given the data so far, most detainees are not and never were our enemies. We've released 3/4 of the Gitmo detainees so far because there was no real evidence against them. Of the remaining 250 or so, only 14 have ever been charged with anything. The government's credibility at this point is non-existent, by any reasonable measure. Of course, if you're 'in the biz' and earning a fat paycheck from Joe Sizpack working in the mostly scam national security industry that exploded after 911 (our only growth industry left at this point, as far as I can see), you're going to continue to maintain the party line no matter what. There is no reason to believe that most the remaining detainees are guilty of anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time when some local bounty hunter, paid by the US to "go out and bring back some terrorists" kidnapped them to make some money, satisfy a personal vendetta, or both. Given the policy choices that the Obama administration has made on everything from renditions to millitary tribunals to the the role of state secrets in terrorism trials - it's not clear to me which party that you are referring to, but as a man who puts principle first, I expect that you'll waste no time in taking the Obama adminstration to task and excoriating them for their many shortfalls on these fronts.

Demise? Hey - it's a brand new day over at GM, and you're the owner! The taxpayers have $50 billion riding on this experiment, so it's time to cross your fingers and hope for the best, particularly since the peak market-cap for GM was around $56 billion in the year 2000. I certainly wish the government the best in its role as majority owner/regulator/UAW-parter, and hope that they'll be able to navigate through the seemingly impossible gauntlet of interest-conflicts that are inherent in such a role, much less in securing private bidders/financing after what happened to the bondholders vis-a-vis the unions in the restructuring that the Obama administration put together. If the goal is to return GM to profitability someday, by selling cars at a price that exceeds the cost of building them, moves like limiting production-inputs from China in favor of UAW-controlled plants in the US, keeping small fuel-efficient cars built by the Opel division out of the US and replicating all of the tooling, etc necessary to build them here, etc seem like strange moves. However - I suspect that as owner/regulator/etc Congress will do what's necessary to motivate people to buy whatever GM produces - be it in the form of subsidies, tarriffs, tax-credits, etc - so I have no doubt that they'll find a way to keep vehicles moving out the door.

Acceptable: -Someone is dishonest about their skills/background/ability/limitations and you want to warn others. Lots of grey areas here, but if it looks like you've got the right motives and are clearly making an effort to be as polite as you can, the response will generally be positive and people will probably appreciate what you've done. Lame: -Someone is honest about their skills/background/ability/limitations and you didn't enjoy climbing with them, so you log-in and try to make them look as bad as possible. You'll generally make yourself look worse than the person that you're trying to slander. I wasn't there, but based on what I've seen here Chris looks like the classier guy, and it was perfectly reasonable for him to make a 100-percent public response to DL's characterization of him. ******************************************************************* FWIW - we all have off-days, and partners that can roll with the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of teaming up with another person to climb something are far more valuable, and far more likely to have an easy time making and keeping climbing partners than people that can't seem to take these things in stride. As an example of the above, here's a story from my own past, when I *had* to fit the profile of the ultimate-cc.com-nightmare partner: I'd met John Aguiar a couple of times, and run into him at Lillooet on at least one occasion, but had never climbed with him before - and he seemed like a great guy. We make plans to hit Baker's north ridge, and I wake up on the morning we're supposed to head out feeling waaay less than stellar, but keep on packing and hope that I'll start feeling better. It takes me way longer to pack than normal, and I roll over to John's place at least an hour late. On the way up there, I start feeling worse and worse, and about 30 minutes from Bellingham I ask him to pull over so that I can go hurl in the bushes. Feeling better? "Maybe" is all I can muster, and I waste more time trying to figure out whether or not that's the case before concluding that it would be best to bail. On the drive back to Seattle, I start to feel better, feel good enough to attempt to salvage the day by driving over to Leavenworth to do some cragging. About the time we're zipping by the Money Creek campground on US2, I need to pull over again and we wind up killing another hour while I'm sitting on the side of the road and randomly oscillating between feeling better and getting floored by nausea. The most memorable thing about the trip for me was what a complete gentleman John was about the entire thing. It's hard to imagine anyone being cooler or more pleasant in those circumstances. He was cracking jokes, in good spirits, and clearly making an effort to make me feel better. He even sent me a funny e-mail along with a photo of me slouched over somewhere from our "Statewide Ditch Tour." While he'd be well within his rights to run screaming if I ever broached the topic of climbing together again, I'd tie in with the guy any-time, and the way he handled himself on that day said far more about the kind of partner he'd be than if everything had gone according to plan. There are probably been some days when I've been a good partner, other days when I've been average, and some days where I've just sucked by any reasonable standard - but I've been lucky to hook up with some great folks that play by the golden rule even when the chips are down - and they're the ones that I try to emulate, and that I look forward to teaming up with again after every trip.

Wow. Beautiful.

I know we're all supposed to leap to the conclusion that this proves these guys were active terrorists who were rightly detained at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib or God-only-knows-where-else and should never have been released. But isn't it equally possible that some, perhaps many of these people were, in fact, innocent, and wrongly detained for a period of years, possibly (probably?) tortured before being released? And isn't it just possible their wrongful detention and torture may have the effect of turning otherwise neutral individuals into angry, hate-filled terrorists bent on revenge against their former captors? I don't know about you, but if I was detained for years and subjected to various methods of "enhanced interrogation" despite having done nothing wrong, I'd be nursing some pretty serious grudges upon my release. I'd want to get back at the people who locked me up and torturted me for no reason. I'd want to blow up their shit. Hell, I'd want to blow up them, never mind their shit. So, yeah, there's a good chance I'd turn up on a battlefield somewhere after my release, and I wouldn't be fighting to defend my former captors. These reports stating that former captors - former torture subjects in some cases - are turning up on battlefields fighting for the other side are hardly surprising. In fact, they're pretty much inevitable. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." What do you want to bet that particular biblical quote never appeared on the title page of any of GWB's briefing notes? As a general narrative, Murray, that's all feasible enough - but in this particular case, going from goatherd-minding-your-own-business-wrongfully-detained-in-Gitmo to Taliban commander orchestrating attacks against the US/British/etc seems a tad improbable. I can definitely see the Taliban handing the guy a Koran, a suicide vest, and a love note to read to each of the 72 virgins that they've assured him will heap up on him in a giant-holy-nekkid-love-pile if he succeeds in slaughtering as many people (not sure if they're more interested in taking out American soliders or schoolgirls these days) as possible in order to capitalize on his newfound radicalism and zeal. It's harder to see them handing a guy like that the reigns and giving him responsibility for leading the troops out in the field, coordinating attacks, etc if he was a green innocent beforehand. I'll concede that that's possible, but it just seems terribly unlikely in this case. Innocent-turned-terrorist or hardened radical anxious to return to the fold and get his jihad on? Not sure it's easy to tell which way Occam's razor will cut without knowing more specifics in this and many other cases. I think it's also worth pointing out that while some of the Taliban may selectively attack US forces in response to their mistreatment by the same. I think it would be a grave mistake to assume that their roots go back no deeper than that, that they have no positive agenda of their own that's limited to and defined by a simple tit-for-tat reaction to US moves, or that their targets and ultimate goals are so limited and specific.