JosephH

I'd be up for heading out cragging thursday afternoon...

Wow! 5 of 500! Man, we're really making a dent in global and anti-U.S. terrorism this way. Maby 25 of 500 have been anyone you could remotely consider a 'high value' individual. It's a joke - as is the entire 'war on terror'. Why? Because it costs us about $3B / 'high value' target whereas 'they' can field such an individual for about $300k or so max. total expenses. Our entire approach to 'fighting' terrorism is bankrupt and ineffective.

It was all for show for the election. You knew back then she got knocked-up messing around and neither of them had any intention of getting married until Mom suddenly needed to 'legitamize' her daughter's natural proclivities.

Translation and summation of previous nine posts: Reasonable people wail at the corruption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America, and of the treasonous and inept prosecution of unnecessary preemptive war. We wail at the shame of the establishment and employment of the exact camps and methods that we as a nation have prosecuted others as war criminals and for crimes against humanity.

Iran is not Iraq - take a look at it in google earth. Pretty much becomes immediately apparent why there will be no US troops in it.

Iran is not Iraq - take a look at it in google earth. Pretty much becomes immediately apparent why there will be no US troops in it.

We don't invade Iran, we pay Israel do that work whenever it needs to be done. If you want to know when you have to watch our Gulf fleet movements - when they back way up, then you can be pretty sure there is at least the possibility of an attack.

Bullshit - the majority of this trash is just more of the same misinformation the military was dishing out when the the large majority of the 'terrorists' were sold to them. If the occasional one does make it on to a battlefield, the first question to ask is what was their true prior history and did we actually create a problem in gitmo. How many of these few were innocent prior to gitmo and only became a problem after our treatment of them. The gitmo story that ought to be getting air is the unbelieveable travesty of the Uighurs who were fighting the Chinese and miraculously ended up in gitmo ever since despite being completely innocent of any threat against the U.S.. We've been hanging onto them for the Chinesee. It couldn't be more pathetic or criminal.

That is, and to a degree would be, a valid argument - had we not gone about our business like a crackwhore who'd just won the lottery. The problem with Steve's attempted defense of the financial industry is that they're trying to use that 'swing' / 'volatility' argument to conceal the true impact of overwhelming loan origination and underwriting fraud, overgrasping use of debt, and the fact this was all more about 'churning' numbers than any real value creation. He's saying in a effect, "if you ignore the details and don't call it a bubble, it will come back again". In the end, that's the deal with 'mark-to-market' - it's designed to be governor on valuations, to keep them honest. If that's thwarted long enough by obfusticating true asset values behind ABS' shimmering curtains of sliced-and-diced loans and fraudulent ratings, then a terrible bill eventually becomes due. The issue with the conversion of all our debt to ABS's is their disconnecting proxy effect - that the market valuation you're marking to isn't the demand for the underlying assets anymore, but of the ABS - and hell, most of the time you couldn't even identify the actual houses, cars, credit cards, or students the pieces of paper represented. In essence, it's saying "let's try to reinflate the bubble of fantasy" rather than fix the problem - it's a defense of insanity, greed, fraud, and turning a blind eye. It's got a lot in common with a masturbating 14 year old who hopes screaming "close the door!" after his mother inadvertantly walked into the bathroom will return the situation to normal. The problem with basing our economy on churning housing values, or inflated dotbomb companies, is that it's mostly fluff and doesn't represent real exportable value - it's all good until some fool yells "where's the beef?".

Steve is attempting to defend the financial industry's hope / fantasy that if they just hold on to the assests long enough they'll come back around - that they're really 'retaining' their value so long as the loans are being serviced - so there is no need to mark them to market or even assume they might not be worth at least the loan amount. In order to support that position you have be willing to say with a straight face that all the real estate is holding its value and everything is going to be fine. As a member of the first family of capitalism he's pretty much obligated to defend it even in the face of its complete and utter failure.

Hopefully the market will level off high like it did after WWII, but there could be a rough ride still to come if the track of our real estate values takes same path the Japanese took. Also, this is a societal and cultural crisis more than a politically generated one. Personally, I blame 60 years of television and consumer advertising: you can have it all, you just have to pay for it sooner or later - in this case it just happened to be later. The packaging of all four forms of consumer debt - home, auto, credit card, and student loans - into asset backed securities was thought to be a stroke of genius relative to distributing risk, in reality - and with the help of no small amount of greedy and fraudulent behavior - it simply masked risk so essentially everybody could make it to the top of the mountain in style. But, we all know the name of the game is getting back down from the top alive - unfortunately, in an economic sense, this time a lot of us aren't going to make it.

The problem with having to mark toxic loans to market and running a balance sheet (hint: the 'bottom' is still a long way off...):

Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ about a year ago and it's been an exodus of editorial integrity ever since - Murdoch's right wing orientation and priority on profit and entertainment have already changed the journal forever. The question isn't how editorially compromised it is, only how bad the compromise will end up over time. On the whole, from an editorial perspective, it's sort of holding your breath wondering just how low the markets can go. However, a June 5 Journal news story quoted charges that Murdoch had made and broken similar promises in the past.

The problem with the banks/economy is that no one, not the last administration, not this administration - no one - wants to mark the value of the 'toxic' assets to market, run a balance sheet, and publicly read the results out loud. If they did, all the banks would have to declare bankrupcy yesterday. The problem? Everyone is trying to pay lip service to 'capitalism' and the 'power of free markets' by trying - in any and all conceivable ways - to avoid nationalizing the banks and honestly acknowledging the complete and total failure of both our ideology and our regulatory system. The only way to avoid that is by the government buying toxic assets at above market prices thereby rewarding bad players and behavior - it's a lose-lose scenario however you look at it and has resulted in a bi-partisan paralysis.

"Corporations without appropriate government oversight are indistinguishable from organized crime" Conclusion from a friend's 1987 accounting / auditing dissertation...

Bill and I are going to be going in to siezures soon - where are those pics!!!!

If it's one of those old style wire plastic u-stem jobs I would instantly retire it and do whatever is required to insure it's never used again. Those were pretty notorious for collapsing and exploding.

Regardless of the quality of the design on certain products, they have good manufacturing processes - how bad can they screw up a set of nuts...? Hell, I'll even overlook the fact they're made in China if they're good.

Yeah, I definitely have more faith in their Crack 'N Ups than I do their cams - no badly designed and spec'd moving parts.

One who doesn't have historical faith in the history of the product's lineage or the design and implementation of the business end of the product.

Not at all, just their cams.

Like the idea of carrying complementary sets with deeper and shallower angles versus just the two sets of HB's I carry now. I mainly use the HB Alloys rather than the brassies - is BD going to be making the larger ones?

Tyler, I can tell you just don't know how dangerous rabid gearwhores can get if you don't feed them beta pics, otherwise they'd be up already...

Never seen those - got pics?

Was just curious about this statement as I can't imagine using anything but offset nuts at Beacon. I have climbed at Beacon for the past 13 years. I have never even seen an offset. Can't imagine. Maybe this is why I see a lot of folks trying to use cams for everything. I'd probably say that if you aren't racking at least one set of offsets out there then lots of placements are likely more hassle than they need to be.