j_b

reading some of that stuff makes it difficult to believe it's the 21st century. "yeah dude! what do you think cro-magnon man did when the neighbor checked out his woman's loin a little too intently?"

the following article is the kind of news fairweather does not want you to see because it shows we shouldn't be over there: Poll reveals hostility to US and support for rebel cleric By Anne Penketh Diplomatic Editor 17 June 2004 The Bush administration's last remaining justification for the invasion of Iraq has been demolished by a private poll revealing that only 2 per cent of Iraqis regard the occupying forces as liberators. The poll results are devastating for both President George Bush and Tony Blair, who are fond of saying that future generations of Iraqis will thank them for liberating their country. Tony Blair has consistently said that history will prove him right for engineering the downfall of a cruel tyrant, even if weapons of mass destruction were not found. [..] http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=532337

until there is evidence, his record stands although reporters should keep digging. in the meantimes, let's try not to make a scapegoat out of him. we should not have any illusions about pro-cycling (pro-sports in general) but let's put it in the proper context. lance is amazing!

i think your best bet is climbing some of the peaks above sheridan glacier. i have done the short hike to the terminus of sheridan and climbing the glacier would seem the best way to access the higher peaks of the area (short of using a helo). it's also not quite as far as childs and you could take the shuttle as far as the airport if you don't have wheels. everything is so close, yet so far. good luck.

davis-holland/loving arms and centerfold at index. good training and they are always fun.

no, it wasn't in josh's post. i notified a moderator about your post before you edited it.

harpell, you are one sick puppy. this "young christian man" image of yours is apparently a very thin veneer.

http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5397000 "Pentagon Iraq Abuse Probe to Examine Top Commander Thu Jun 10, 2004 06:13 PM ET By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon plans to widen a probe into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners to include actions of the top U.S. commander in Iraq"

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/international/09SOLD.html "Reversing itself, the Army said Tuesday that a G.I. was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Army had previously said Specialist Sean Baker's medical discharge in April was unrelated to the injury he received last year at the detention center, where the United States holds suspected terrorists. Mr. Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four American soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. He said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American."

http://rtorgerson.blogspot.com/ "Most of Those New Jobs Reported Are Imaginary John Crudele's jobs commentary in the New York Post caught my eye last month. He reported that a huge number of the new jobs being reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics were actually the imaginary invention of a statistical method known as "birth/death modeling". This model attempts to correct the notion that the employment figures don't account for jobs created by new businesses that haven't reported in to state Unemployment Insurance agencies yet. So long term studies showed that the rate of dying business was very similar to the rate of new businesses formed - on average, over the business cycle. So, the birth/death model imputes a number for new businesses based upon the number of old businesses that died that month. (If population rates were calculated this way, we would 'discover ' that, among other things, fatal traffic accidents cause babies.) Intrigued, I looked closer. To their credit, the BLS publishes their entire methodology online. All you have to do is wade through explanations of statistical number crunching as described by Washington bureaucrats. What I found suggests that Crudele may have been understating the problem. When you actually reproduce the BLS methodology described in the BLS Handbook of Methods (Chapter 2), you arrive at the conclusion that fully 88% of the new jobs claimed to have been created since March 2003 are imaginary."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/06/11/terror_report/index.html "Cooking the books on terror The State Department finally admits that its report on terrorist activity since 2001 -- which showed improvement under Bush -- was marred by bad data funneled to it by other White House agencies. Sound familiar? [...] The moment of truth came on May 17. A sharp Washington Post opinion piece by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stanford political scientist David Laitin sliced "Patterns 2003" to shreds. Their review showed that the "number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003," or 36 percent, and that "the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years." The professors accused the government of concocting a misleading picture by combining the statistics for all "terrorist" acts, whether or not they were "significant." The number of "nonsignificant" terrorist incidents dropped -- but as the professors noted drily, that fact is itself "nonsignificant" and was used to create a phony statistic."

let's face it, it's difficult to think of climbs favoring shorter climbers. shorter people have the advantage of a lower center of gravity but taller folks have greater reach. I can't think of too many instances when a lower center of gravity is a greater advantage than a longer reach. there is no doubt a point where the reach advantage is not enough to offset the torque associated with tall bodies (sorry cracked you are f*ed). pure friction, continuous cracks, cramped spaces and overhangs are instances when a lower center of gravity rules if the lack of holds is uniform or number of holds is great enough to cancel out the reach advantage. but let's face it few are the climbs where these conditions are met because friction or crack climbs or well-featured rock often have reach issues. short people just have to be better climbers which they often are (yes, i am short).

classic attempt at rewriting history! from very early on, nobody in the antiwar camp believed iraq was an imminent threat due to a wmd program. some people left open the possibility that some banned weapons were being built or left over from years ago but the administration never had any credibility on this topic as it was obvious they had decided to invade no matter what. furthermore most every piece of evidence provided by the administration during the build up was debunked within a matter of weeks if not days. as an example that most will remember, powell presentation at the un was widely laughed at since it was largely based on data that had been shown to be untrue or hot air. as the build up progressed, un inspections weren't finding anything even though they were supposedly acting on us intel ("we know where they are") and the entire un fiasco showed that bush never had any other intention but to invade. let me also point out for the nth time that not trusting your governement isn't equivalent to trusting the enemy. don't tell me that someone supposedly as smart as jayb does not understand the gross faulty logic behind his diatribe. but conservatives like him have made extensive use of classic jingoist rhetoric to intimidate war opponents and it points to their willingness to suppress dissent by any means necessary including that of curtailing speech ("you are either with us or against us"). nothing new here but it largely explains how so many people were intimitated into supporting this war. anyhow none of this is relevant to my initial point. nobody here claimed that the wmd fiasco was the only reason for opposing the war, it was just an example of how the supposed liberal media behaved when the chips came down even though there was plenty of evidence discreting the wmd scare from very early on. opposing the war on the basis of lack of serious evidence for wmd was certainly reason enough, but they were many other reasons to disagree. the humanitarian aspect and obvious geostrategic motives being only a couple of them. none are mutually exclusive.

juicy run down of how the nyt drummed up support for war: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/27/times/index.html "When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."

sherpa peak - west ridge mt thompson - west ridge lundin peak - west ridge big snow mtn - 5.7 buttress high priest - west ridge argonaut - nw face tooth - sw face w/beckey var. all in brown beckey

i said ~65% had a liberal perspective on social issues. from health care to environment, >50% to 80% americans, according to most polls, show a long-standing liberal point of view. even people like pp, have a liberal perpective on some social issues. you, in turn, may not but it says more about you than anything else. thank you for providing your opinion on this. unfortunately, it is not substantiated by data. unsupported opinions, whether yours or mine on this topic are not really relevant, neither is the opinion of right-wing talking heads who don't substantiate their pov with more than anecdotal evidence.

that's just plain not true. every single claim about wmd's was countered prior going to war. some progressives left open the possibility that saddam may have had some wmd left from pre-1991, but they certainly pointed out that the case for wmd as presented by the administration or blair's was simply not credible prior to invasion. as for intelligence agencies, it's just not true that all agencies said saddam was actively pursuing wmd and it represented an imminent threat. it has been well established that the administration cherrypicked info that suported its intent even though the sources were often not credible (i.e. chalabi and other iraqi defectors that were discredited with our intelligence agencies) see famous sy hersh article: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction Speaker: Powell, Colin - Secretary of State Date: 2/5/2003 Quote/Claim: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails." [source: DOS Web site] Fact: The key defector "failed a second polygraph test and in May 2002, intelligence agencies were warned that the information was unreliable." - Telegraph, 2/19/04 Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction Speaker: Bush, George - President Date: 2/8/2004 Quote/Claim: "I expected to find the weapons [because] I based my decision on the best intelligence possible...The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon." [source: Meet the Press transcript] Fact: "Zero tons [of chemical weapons], or close to it, was always a strong possibility in the eyes of experts who knew the record of U.N. inspections. But Bush administration officials, in their overtures to war, never acknowledged it." - Boston Globe Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction Speaker: Bush, George - President Date: 2/8/2004 Quote/Claim: "We looked at the intelligence." [source: Meet the Press transcript] Fact: Knight Ridder reported that CIA officers "said President Bush ignored warnings" that his WMD case was weak. And Greg Thielmann, the Bush State Department's top intelligence official, "said suspicions were presented as fact, and contrary arguments ignored." Knight Ridder later reported, "Senior diplomatic, intelligence and military officials have charged that Bush and his top aides made assertions about Iraq's banned weapons programs and alleged links to al-Qaeda that weren't supported by credible intelligence, and that they ignored intelligence that didn't support their policies." - Knight-Ridder, 6/13/03, 6/28/03; CBS News, 6/7/03 Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction Speaker: Bush, George - President Date: 2/8/2004 Quote/Claim: "The international community thought he had weapons." [source: Meet the Press transcript] Fact: The international community told the White House that it could not verify the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The IAEA and U.N. both repeatedly told the Administration it had no evidence that Iraq possessed WMD. On 2/15/03, the IAEA said, "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." On 3/7/03 IAEA Director Mohamed El Baradei said nuclear experts had found "no indication" that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. At the same time, AP reported, "U.N. weapons inspectors have not found any 'smoking guns' in Iraq during their search for weapons WMD." AP also reported, "U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said his teams have not uncovered any WMD." - U.S. State Department, 2/14/03; NY Times, 3/7/03; AP, 1/9/03, 2/14/03 Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction Speaker: Bush, George - President Date: 2/8/2004 Quote/Claim: "I expected to find the weapons [because] I based my decision on the best intelligence possible...The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon." [source: Meet the Press transcript] Fact: The White House was repeatedly warned by the intelligence community about the imprecision of intelligence on WMD's. The day before the President appeared on Meet The Press, The Washington Post reported, "President Bush and his top advisers ignored many of the caveats and qualifiers included in the classified report on Saddam Hussein's weapons." Specifically, the President made unequivocal statements that Iraq "has got chemical weapons" two months after the DIA concluded that there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons." He said, "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production" three months after the White House received an intelligence report that clearly indicated Department of Energy experts concluded the tubes were not intended to produce uranium enrichment centrifuges. He said, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," three months after "the CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about" the claim. - Washington Post, 2/7/04; Bush statement, 11/3/02; DIA report, 2002; Bush statement, 1/28/03; NIE, October, 2002; WP, 7/23/03; Bush statement, 10/7/02; WP, 9/26/03 Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction Speaker: Cheney, Dick - Vice President Date: 1/9/2004 Quote/Claim: "[T]he reporting that we had prior to the war this time around was all consistent with that -- basically said that he had a chemical, biological and nuclear program, and estimated that if he could acquire fissile material, he could have a nuclear weapon within a year or two." [source: Waxman Database] Fact: "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has -- or will -- establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities." - Defense Intelligence Agency, 2002 Topic: Weapons of Mass Destruction Speaker: Bush, George - President Date: 10/7/2002 Quote/Claim: "Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." [source: White House Web site] Fact: "French intelligence was telling us that there was effectively no real evidence of a WMD programme. That's why France wanted a longer extension on the weapons inspections. The French, the Germans and the Russians all knew there were no weapons there -- and so did Blair and Bush as that's what the French told them directly. Blair ignored what the French told us and instead listened to the Americans." - British Intelligence Agent, Sunday herald, 6/1/03 http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/custom/cap/findorg.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=45294 do you need more? because there is plenty where the above came from ...

consider the results from this survey while you are at it: http://www.fair.org/reports/journalist-survey.html "This survey shows that it is a mistake to accept the conservative claim that journalists are to the left of the public. There appear to be very few national journalists with left views on economic questions like corporate power and trade—issues that may well matter more to media owners and advertisers than social issues like gay rights and affirmative action. The larger "liberal media" myth has been maintained, in part, by the well-funded flow of conservative rhetoric that selectively highlights journalists' personal views while downplaying news content. It also has been maintained by diverting the spotlight away from economic issues and placing it instead on social issues. In reality, though, most members of the powerful Washington press corps identify themselves as centrist in both of these areas. It is true, as conservative critics have publicized, that the minority of journalists not in the "center" are more likely to identify as having a "left" orientation when it comes to social issues. However, it is also true that the minority of journalists not in the "center" are more likely to identify as having a "right" orientation when it comes to economic issues. Indeed, these economic policy views are often to the right of public opinion. When our attention is drawn to this fact, one of the central elements of the conservative critique of the media is exposed to be merely sleight of hand. This illusion has not been exposed here merely to replace it with an equally false mirror image of the conservative critique. Painting journalists as the core of the "conservative media" does not do justice to the complexity of the situation. Like many profit-sector professionals journalists tend to hold "liberal" social views and "conservative" economic views. Most of all, though, they can be broadly described as centrists. This adherence to the middle is consistent with news outlets that tend to repeat conventional wisdom and ignore serious alternative analyses. This too often leaves citizens with policy "debates" grounded in the shared assumptions of those in positions of power. Which brings us back to the conservative critique. It is based on the propositions that: (1) journalists' views are to the left of the general public, and (2) that these views influence the news content that they produce. Having now exposed the first point for the myth that it is, we are left with the issue of personal views influencing news content. There are two important responses to this claim. First, it is sources, not journalists, who are allowed to express their views in the conventional model of "objective" journalism. Therefore, we learn much more about the political orientation of news content by looking at sourcing patterns rather than journalists' personal views. As this survey shows, it is government officials and business representatives to whom journalists "nearly always" turn when covering economic policy. Labor representatives and consumer advocates were at the bottom of the list. This is consistent with earlier research on sources. For example, analysts from the centrist Brookings Institution and right-wing think thanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are those most quoted in mainstream news accounts; left-wing think tanks are often invisible. When it comes to sources, "liberal bias" is nowhere to be found. Second, we must not forget that journalists do not work in a vacuum. It is crucial to remember the important role of institutional context in setting the broad parameters for the news process. Businesses are not in the habit of producing products that contradict their fundamental economic interests. The large corporations that are the major commercial media in this country—not surprisingly—tend to favor style and substance which is consonant with their corporate interests; as do their corporate advertisers. It is here, at the structural level, that the fundamental ground rules of news production are set. Of course, working journalists sometimes succeed in temporarily challenging some of those rules and boundaries. But ultimately, if they are to succeed and advance in the profession for any length of time, they must adapt to the ground rules set by others—regardless of their own personal views."

your vision of journalism is truly sobering. if reporters had waited for dod info to report on the 100's of civilian deaths in fallujah we would have never heard about it. the same goes for prisoner torture, reconstruction, nature of the opposition and on for countless issues related to this war. dod interaction with the media during times of war pertains more to propaganda than news. i am not saying you should not listen to what dod has to say, but to make it the most relevant source is bound to produce the same uncritical news reporting we are accustomed to by the mainstream media and certainly not the type of critical reporting the 4th estate is supposed to do. how many major news outlet were critical of the wmd justification, while progressives were crying foul from the get go? how surprising that jo blow armed with a computer and an internet connection would apparently know more than what is reported by the media? why did we have to go to the foreign press to find out about most of these issues? didn't npr and other media outlets have access to the same sources the foreign press did? or perhaps the problem is they'd rather stick with dod. do you think said foreign press has a majority of gop/dod sources regarding iraq? gee, just imagine, they probably don't and they still manage to report critically about what's going on.

specialized tools are great for specialists. what ice tools to bring for a climb is often (for me) the most difficult issue to settle.

people can say the data is trivia all day long, it won't change that npr, and all mainstream media btw, use a large majority of conservative/business sources for their reports. if npr were truly liberal, wouldn't it use primarily progressive sources? why let your opponents define and frame the issue on their terms instead of having people you agree with do so? it simply does not make any sense and it is a very convoluted argument which belies its weakness. the journalists themselves may have a liberal slant on social issues (hey, like ~65% of americans), but the usual message on the economy and foreign policy does not really challenge that of the people in power. if the message does not question the status quo on big policy issues, it isn't really progressive.

i think innovation in tools is great but i was only noting that it was a form of 'aid' (easier to hang on a tool with a pinky rest than one without), which seemed contradictory to the original justification for dropping leashes. tlg: i thought as well that many people today were going leashless. my point was that i wasn't certain it was advantageous for most situations, i.e. aren't most of these people climbing ice and doing a little dry tooling on the side?

it'd be great if there were several us brand teams since there appears to be a number of potential sponsors, but the post-lance us coverage of cycling does not necessarily have a bright future.

torture "lite", beatings, rape, people turning up dead ... and all these videos the admnistration does not want us to see ...

let's not talk about systemic torture, it could be embarrassing? is this a veiled threat?