j_b

who the f**k is that? you also said i supported hamas and hezbollah! you are a freaking liar peter puget and i am sick and tired of your intimidation tactics? you figure it just will be enough to smear someone to have them shut up, huh?

do you really think it's normal to accuse people of supporting terrorist groups on the internet and then pretend nothing happened? what planet do you live on?

It looks like a lot of fun climbing Ridge running is the best!

the ability to link doesn't bother me too much, the willingness to make up stuff and point the finger, however ... I love it when a plan comes together

the bad rock i recall on the lower part is the top of the dihedral (rotten alcove). anyhow, has anyone looked at the center/right side of the lower buttress?

the rock sucks? it has been a while but i'd say there is may be a half rope length of bad rock on the lower buttress and about as much on the upper! overall rock quality and climbing on the lower buttress is pretty average, but the upper part is stellar especially if you stick to the ridge crest.

The Magus by John Fowles. Found it in the 'library' at Plummer hut many years ago while waiting for the helo. i had to steal it as i couldn't put it down until i was done.

for sites with registration, go to: http://www.bugmenot.com/ Controversy Over Plans for Changes in U.S. Parks By Julie Cart, Times Staff Writer A series of proposed revisions of National Park policy has created a furor among present and former park officials who believe the changes would weaken protections of natural resources and wildlife while allowing an increase in commercial activity, snowmobiles and off-road vehicles. National Park Service employees warn that the changes, which were proposed by the Department of the Interior and are undergoing a Park Service review, would fundamentally alter the agency's primary mission. "They are changing the whole nature of who we are and what we have been," said J.T. Reynolds, superintendent of Death Valley National Park. "I hope the public understands that this is a threat to their heritage. It threatens the past, the present and the future. It's painful to see this." The potential changes would allow cellphone towers and low-flying tour planes and would liberalize rules that prohibited mining, according to Bill Wade, former superintendent at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Larry Whalon, chief of resource management at Mojave National Preserve, said the changes would take away managers' ability to use laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act to oppose new developments in parks. Although Interior and the Park Service are free to change the service's management polices at any time, they have been amended only twice. The last time was in 2001. Officials at the Park Service's Washington headquarters downplayed the significance of the proposed revisions, saying they were less a reflection of policy than an attempt to start a dialogue. The changes are the brainchild of Paul Hoffman, who oversees the Park Service and was appointed deputy assistant secretary of the Interior in January 2002. Hoffman came to the Park Service after serving as director of the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo. He had previously served as Wyoming state director for then-U.S. Rep. Dick Cheney from 1985 to 1989. "Paul Hoffman had some initial suggestions and prompted us," said David Barna, a Park Service spokesman. "Paul Hoffman was playing devil's advocate. He was saying, 'Show us, the political appointees who make policy, why do you do things the way you do?' It was a starting point. We're a long way from that now. They have drafted a new raw draft." The proposed changes, which have been in the drafting stage for two years, were leaked this week. About the same time, a group of 400 retired Park Service employees scheduled a news conference for today to announce a campaign to block the changes from taking effect. Members of the group said they were particularly concerned about policy changes that would allow snowmobiles to travel over any paved road in any national park in the winter; elevate certain activities already occurring in some parks, such as grazing and mining, to "park purposes" — which would ensure their continuation; and change the acceptable level of air quality from "natural background" to air that has been altered by human presence. Park Service management policies are based on congressional intent, case law and the 1916 Organic Act, and have afforded parks the highest level of natural resource protection of any federally managed land. The policies instruct Park Service officials to balance visitor use with wildlife needs, resource protection and historic preservation, generally holding protection and preservation as their highest goals. The Interior Department's proposed changes hinge on what Park Service employees say is a revision of what they have been taught is one of the highest priorities: to do no harm to the park. Since its inception in 1916, the Park Service has been charged with maintaining parks "unimpaired" for future generations to enjoy. According to current policies, when park officials determine an activity may lead to impairment, officials are authorized to ban the activity. The proposed changes would alter the definition of impairment from "an impact to any park resource or value [that] may constitute an impairment" to one that can be proved to "permanently and irreversibly adversely [affect] a resource or value." Critics say the new definition would set a standard that is impossibly high. The policy changes were presented to Park Service officials in July. The Department of Interior sent a copy of the revisions to Park Service headquarters in Washington, which forwarded it to its seven regional directors. The directors responded by sending a searing memo to Park Service Director Fran Mainella, criticizing the revisions. The agency convened a working group of 16 longtime employees Aug. 3 in Santa Fe, N.M.. The group met for three days to try to settle on a compromise version of Hoffman's proposal. "I was profoundly shocked at how far it went," said a participant in the workshop. He said the group continued to work on the rewrite but was not sure if its watered-down version would be acceptable to Interior officials. A Park Service supervisor participating in redrafting the policy said a new version was not ready. He rejected the assertion that Hoffman's version was intended only as a provocative idea-generator. "The Hoffman document is what the Department of Interior would publish, absent input from the Park Service," said the Park Service veteran, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Craig Obey, vice president for governmental affairs with the National Parks Conservation Assn., a nonprofit group that seeks to protect parks, also dismissed the claim that Hoffman's document didn't reflect policy. "I would find it surprising that someone would put something like this together as a think piece," Obey said. "Documents like this are put together with a purpose." But according to Interior spokesman John Wright, the Hoffman document "is no longer in play" and the Park Service is free to produce its own changes without adopting any of Hoffman's suggestions. Despite his brief tenure with the Interior Department, Hoffman is familiar with controversy. He has weighed in on issues at Mojave National Preserve, opposing the park staff and siding with ranchers and others on grazing and water issues. Last year, he overruled the decision of the superintendent at Grand Canyon National Park to remove religious plaques on display near the South Rim. And he instructed the park to allow a book that espoused a creationist view of the canyon's formation, which runs counter to the park's own scientific-based approach and had been criticized by the park's scientific staff. While working in Wyoming, Hoffman took the side of ranchers in opposing the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. According to Chuck Neal, a biologist based in Cody, Hoffman gave a speech in 1996 calling the Park Service decision "the equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb in the West." Hoffman was not available for comment. His latest effort has won the praise of at least one longtime adversary of traditional park policy. "The Park Service has been arrogant for a very, very long time. They are a cloistered, almost cult-like society," said Chuck Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Assn., which frequently clashes with the agency over private property rights. "The Park Service doesn't believe it needs to listen to what Congress is telling them. They think, 'We know better how to define the law.' They have a whole history of using parks as a tool to lock up land." But to those loyal to the Park Service's traditions, the management policies are inviolable. "It's a disaster," said Denis Galvin, who was deputy director of the Park Service from 1998 to 2002 and is an expert on the management policies. He noted that seemingly obscure issues such as the requirement for maintaining a dark night sky and preserving quiet would no longer be emphasized. "We know how important these things are for animals," Galvin said. "Birds use the night sky to navigate and animals need to hear each other. This version, as I understand it, doesn't recognize the biological values of those things and it eliminates them as visitor amenities."

Looters descend on plane crash site in Peru PUCALLPA, Peru (AFP) - Residents of this impoverished corner of Peru swarmed onto the site where 40 people perished in a plane crash two days ago, scavenging furiously through the muddy wreckage for money, metal, or anything of value. Armed with rubber boots and machetes, hundreds of men, women and children plunged bare hands into the churned-up ooze of the jungle floor and stripped metal from the charred plane, while authorities, outnumbered, stood helplessly nearby. "Now, we can't stop it. There are very few of us and as you can see, there are more than 1,000 people," one police officer said. The crowds began pressing in Wednesday from Pucallpa, a jungle outpost of 220,000, 840 kilometers (520 miles) northeast of Lima but just a few kilometers (miles) from where the Tans Peru airline Boeing 737-200 went down on Tuesday. Rescuers Thursday finished the grisly task of identifying the 40 dead, confirming that 58 others had survived the crash, many of them badly burned. Nineteen were evacuated to Lima. It was the fifth passenger jet crash worldwide this month. Thursday, once rescuers packed up and left the crash site, it was impossible to hold back the press of local residents who saw opportunity in the midst of tragedy. "All that is to sell to the scrap metal merchant," a 16-year-old boy said of his haul. "It's not good for anything anymore. We have to live somehow," he said. Side by side with a man of about 40, he plunged his hand into the mud, hoping to find something of value. "Anything will do, even clothes. You can sell them," he said. Nearby others were trying, without much success, to strip down one of the plane's motors, still stuck in the swampy ground. "Some people found money," said a woman, Etelvina, who refused to give her last name. "But those who found the most are the police and soldiers who wouldn't let people in," she added bitterly. [...] http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050825/ts_...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Yep AFox, i agree. quite a freaky story. poor guy.

attacks were unleashed within a few posts because the purpose of the thread itself is an attack on progressives. it's standard JayB's slime tactics. it amounts to "antiglobalization" types are the allies of islamofascists because "see they say the same thing". as i have pointed out, the speaker was born and raised in the UK so it should not be too surprising that his rhetoric be somewhat similar to that of western "anti-globalization" types.

cool! i must say i have a little difficulty with the praising of people hurtling themselves over cliffs on perfectly good bicycles and the need to have every climb as safe as possible. perhaps i am just being old school but it seems like a disconnect in messages.

for what it's worth, i believe people misread Jim's comment. He was commenting on the Ralston story, i.e. how a mistake was turned into a big media adventure story.

JayB's arguments suck. just ask me when you want to know about it.

well ... he is probably british born. so you weren't too far off. which illustrates the inanity of what started this thread.

"no idea whose talking squid"

Push Me!

"A day after nine northeastern states pledged to reduce local electric utilities' carbon dioxide pollution by 10 percent over 15 years to combat global warming, California officials said they hoped to outpace their eastern counterparts in a yet-to-be-negotiated pact with Oregon and Washington. Representatives of the three western states plan to meet in Sacramento in mid-September to hash out the details." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/24/AR2005082402000.html?nav=rss_nation

PI editorial, i am impressed! http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/237862_pated.asp Thursday, August 25, 2005 Extreme Politics: American fatwa SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD When they're talking in their hard-to-learn native language to devoted followers, religious extremists feel free to say some pretty horrifying things on TV in the Middle East. And the Middle West, both coasts and the rest of the United States. There are varying levels of obscenity in televangelist Pat Robertson's suggestion that an elected Latin American president, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, should be killed. Robertson's already trying to back off, claiming that his phrase "take him out" could mean a lot of things. You bet. It's sort of like the fight over the meaning of "is." Come on. The meaning was clear. Robertson's "700 Club" show (although carried by ABC Family Channel) deserves a soft-core, single-X rating for trying to revive the U.S. practice of targeting foreign leaders for assassination. Consider the show a harsher double-X for the way it will suggest to some around the world that Christianity might be a religion rooted in blood lust rather than charity. But mark his broadcast XXX for its explicit depiction of extremist influence in American political life. Robertson was a legitimate candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. In 1988, Washington state sent the most pro-Robertson delegation to the party's national convention in New Orleans. Night after night, Robertson prattles on over national TV, promoting a bizarre view of world news. He's not the only embarrassingly extreme religious-political manipulator in the world, but he's ours.

i think we should do an experiment. see if there is a correlation between using one's name in forums on the internet and speed of finding a new job. what do you think?

They'll politely say the guy is a looney but they nevertheless agree with him (like fairweather did). More than religion per se it's 21th century 'manifest destiny'. They insist in continuing to see latin america as their backyard which is probably not possible anymore.

"Brunswick stew is what happens when small mammals carrying ears of corn fall into barbeque pits."

anyone ever tried squirrel stew?

the choir of "it was inappropriate" was priceless as well. i wonder if in the future, hatemongers calling for the murder of elected officials will receive notes from the fbi calling them on their "inappropriate" remarks. so will the FTC investigate? or is janet jackson's boob a greater threat to family values?

"Upon reaching the highway I immediately flagged down a car which slowed, looked me over, and drove on." "no, no, don't stop. i just cleaned the car. he is going to put blood all over the backseat."