JosephH

i'm sure you'll have em brainwashed in no time Joeseph Never know - a whole new staff would kind of suck in terms of there likely being no good overlapping handoff of the park's operations let alone just the climbing aspects. Would do my best, but it would depend entirely on who we got dealt. Hopefully Erik would just come back, but I'm beginning to have my doubts about that.

The only way Cheney could "sum it up" is if he were speaking from behind bars for treason... Your words could easily be labeled 'sedition'. Just saying... It is a funny world when treason becomes diplomacy and patriotism becomes sedition - happened often enough, though...

The only way Cheney could "sum it up" is if he were speaking from behind bars for treason...

Good to know. It wouldn't take too long for the bridges to be pretty suspect all the way around. There's also a 'Friends of Beacon Rock' trail maintenance group that's pretty well organized and I suspect they'll be weighing in on all this over time.

Ivan, those were parking fees and when they did them in they did so as part of a state law forbidding them in the future. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Could be the fishermen are the ones that keep it open, but who knows at this point. It's possible we may lose Viv and Ben (and even Erik if they keep him in Olympia) regardless and it would then be a drag to try and educate and bring around a whole new crew who may or may not be climber-friendly.

I talked with Viv about it - link to details here: Washington State Parks - Current News This was the second park cuts list that was put together by WSP. Beacon missed the first cut, but made it onto the second cut as they only make enough in fees to cover half their operating revenue: Location: Beacon Rock Annual Park Expenditures: $503,848 Annual Total Revenue: $245,914 Cost Savings per year if mothballed: $257,934 % Total Revenue / Park Expenditures: 48.81% Full Time Employees (FTEs): 7.87 Annual Visitation Total: 91,289 Visitor per FTE Annual: 11,596 Park Expend / Visitor: $5.52 But part of reason it's on the list is traffic numbers which are inaccurate. The traffic numbers were only from the campground road going up from the parking lot, and did not include the group campground, boat launch, or main parking lot numbers. The closures are closures as in completely shutting down operations. This would be a disaster at Beacon (and Maryhill) where fishermen will raise hell about it relative to the boat launch. From a climbers' perspective things it very much puts climbing at risk from an outright ban from the outset to bigger issues related to the tourist trail. The problem there is do they leave the green gate open or closed on the park's closure. In either case, with the gate closed and people swinging it, or with no maintenance on the tourist trail bridges, sooner or later someone is going to die and the result would likely be a closure in that scenario as well. It is possible they'd try to shift the operation of the park to Skamania County, but the impact scenarios to climbers would probably not change a great deal in that case even if Skamania County could come up with the funds to keep it open on some basis. Shutting down the BRSP wouldn't affect the Peregrine closure at all other than enforcement - but, if we started poaching because the BRSP staff isn't there then the WDFW would then move to ban climbing entirely. Beyond all that, even if Beacon is spared, there is a good chance Viv and Ben may lose their jobs as more senior folks from closed parks pull rank and take their jobs. New senior rangers unfamiliar and uninterested in climbing would in no way be in our best interest. I have a call into Erik, who is working in Olympia in the finance department of late and hope to hear back from him. In general, however, nothing will be known or decided until the state legislature votes on some hard numbers. It's a bummer for climbing all the way around and so I wouldn't get too carried away with fantasies of poaching-gone-wild as poaching during the closure would just lead to a ban in the course of the first closure after the park shut down. If the BRSP did shut down, then that would be when folks had better self-police effectively or the place would simply be shutdown as too much of a hassle.

Yeah, no Beacon Rock right now in the traditional Southface sense - probably better off at Broughton's or Ozone...

No, it was 'opened' as an extrordinary rendition endpoint where torture could be used and it was specifically chosen for its supposed extra-Constitutional status (which even a heavily conservative SCOTUS made very clear it wasn't). Thank god our founding fathers weren't as wishy-washy as today's conservatives when it came to holding their values and understanding what's important in the face of changing rules and games - they didn't call it a 'constitution' for nothing. The saddest part of all was the neocons corrupted America's values and Constitution in a perverse quest for 'restoring dominance' for a "New American Century" and not out the slightest interest in a war on terror, which was always just an anthem. Again, I'd be shocked if even 25 of the 500 were detainees of sufficient value to even merit the effort, expense, and damage to our standing in the world. This whole rendition slice of the neocon's preemptive war strategy was high treason in and of itself as was the torturous legal letters issued from the OLC to support it. From pretty much any perspective, but especially from increasing U.S. security and influence, everything about both wars and the 'war on terror' have been an abject political, diplomatic, and military failure. It's not your fault, you guys currently in the military do what you do to the best of your ability and do it well; unfortunately, the clowns wielding U.S. military might for the past eight years were completely incompetent to do so. I and any number of guys I know could have done infinitely better with the same resources; in fact, I have no doubt you also could have done better and would have done things quite differently yourself.

I haven't climbed in so long I've forgotten how to walk off-concrete and can't lift a line thicker than a shoelace. Pretty sure I couldn't slep all that gear without a gearSlave either - can Gent help me...?

Ok, I got it - no bolting this Sunday...

What's the deal with this? Been consistently erratic for weeks now. Seems like you guys need more bandwidth, cycle provisioning, or that there's some bottleneck somewhere...

Explain to me how you rationalize and justify indefinitely detaining 17 Uighurs who were fighting the Chinese, not the U.S. - are we working for the Chinese military now? And no, people like me have nothing whatsoever to do with why it cost so much - a fullhouse of piss poor political, intelligence, diplomatic, and military decisions made by the previous administration are what have squandered $3T only to foster more terrorism than it's prevented and left the U.S. little better prepared to deal with a terrorist threat then on 9/10/2001. The gross stupidity of the decisions made in the ME and at home since 2001 relative to true security for U.S. interests at home and abroad is only surpassed by the complete squandering of human, material, and financial resources which could have been used infinitely more effectively for our long term security. Hey, it's been an unbelievably pathetic, ineffectual, and counterproductive response to terrorism on every single front since 2001. Again, the entire Bush administration might as well been hand-picked agents of China's MSS and Iran's VEVAK for how well they've bolstered those nation's global interests at the heavy expense of our own.

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.