tvashtarkatena

Didn't you recently join the 20th century with your own phone, or was that more lies and innuendo? I'm planning on being down in Ootah for at least 2 weeks - so a rendezvous is the ticket, however that can be managed. I'm driving - so I can haul gear in case a cheap flight to Vegas is in the cards.

Plus - it's getting' to be springtime for Hitler and O-oo-tah!

So, Apologist Ropegun Running Dog, it's probably not to early to take a brief break from WillYouBeMyFriend?Space and start talking about some spring training weekends. These offsets are looking' aaaaawful shiny… Wknd Mar 8, 13, 22nd still free…txt me, baby.

Only a fool would. One who wishes to be urinated on. I rest my case.

Never underestimate a jellyfish.

The names have been released: http://www.registerguard.com/rg/news/31147608-76/avalanche-snow-skiers-wallowa-broken.html.csp Condolences to friends and family. Rough season.

I've never lusted after a gif so hard. I fkn love that robot.

Now do you see what I have to go through with these people, FW? I know you're already wise to this, but stick with dumb friends. Cow-eyed head nods - so much easier. Lenin making out with Stalin. That would be beyond awesome.

My rule of thumb for steep snow: If an experienced climber isn't comfortable climbing a snow route unroped, a beginner shouldn't be there with or without a rope.

One can appreciate Jay's recommendation to further worsen the already dire wealth disparity. This disparity is particularly egregious in our schools, which are too heavily funded by local property taxes. We need to go the other direction, actually, if we're going to reverse the shitshow we're creating. Funding for public schools is an equal protection issue - it should not rely on who can afford a McMansion and who cannot. A po kid should get just as good an education as a rich one. If the rich want better, there are private schools. Or should poor kids be punished for the situation they were born into? Regarding giving parents the funding call - my neighbor is prez of her PTA - and she reports it is a pen of dysfunctional idiots. I've heard the same from many parents. The last person you want making a 'public good' funding decision is a rabid parent who cares about li'l Timmy and nobody else. If parents want better schools, they can vote to better fund and manage ALL schools - not just li'l Timmy's. A healthy amount of Zen detachment there is preferred if you want a fairer outcome. That is, if you want that fairer outcome. I do.

The upper ice pitches on LR are generally straightforward. Having one tool with a adze for chopping a some foot placements can be a help on the final crux section - it was very hard and surprisingly smooth when we were on it. We expected it to be a little picked out but it appeared untouched. Can you guess that I brought two hammers? Note the we climbed late season during a high snow year. Navigating the Carbon wasn't too bad. The upper crevasse field has lured more than one party to the ridge's left side - don't buy it. Climber's right is where you want to gain the ridge proper. We dead ended at the toe of the ridge, then backtracked and descended a few hundred feet to get it right - no big. If you're not looking up at a straight shot to Thumb Rock on snow, reconsider your position. But first, the schrund. As you'd expect, it's huge - but conveniently filled with ice avi debris for us. If it's not so easy - it's also not a place you'd prefer to hang around for long. Look up and you'll see what I mean. By far the nastiest and most strenuous bit for us was front pointing up to Thumb Rock on boilerplate that was under constant bombardment. From the base of the ridge, quickly traverse right the first few hundred feet to get out of the worst line of fire. The debris fans will likely punctuate this. Climbing earlier season can offer up more neve and less rock fall, but often at the expense of a more postholy approach and possible avi hazard. There may be a free lunch in there somewhere if you can cherry pick conditions, but those are generally your competing parameters, with weather as the wild card.

Yeaaah, I don't care what FDR thought about unions. My phone tells me its 2014. Ditto for Obama or any other president. They're neither educators nor union experts. Or maybe I SHOULD call the president about that faulty light circuit? Call me crazy, but I'm going to get my information about the art and science of teaching from...wait for it - professional teachers. Fortunately for that effort, I have several friends in the biz. As uzhe, the issues therein are somewhat more nuanced and complex than the FW's stick figure and weirdly POTUScentric universe might allow. While 'If A then Z' is a reliable two stroke for belching great clouds of Bold Proclamations with an 'insufficient time to derive' footnote - as ole Glenn Beck and Co can attest, it doesn't help one's cred much in a room full of grownups. The world's got all the two stroke experts it can use.

You'll be fine in those boots temp-wise. Treat them with Nikwax Fabric and Leather beforehand (recommended by Scarpa - works for me): http://nikwax-usa.com/en-us/products/productdetail.php?productid=261 The Platypus plusBottles are flexy and hold boiling water. Take some extra fuel, heat em up, stuff em in your boots n socks to drive the moisture out. If its high and dry the air will help suck the moisture out.

Don't know how to break this to you, but, other than your fellow teachers, there aren't too many folks who actually like your union. There are those who hate it, and those who tolerate it. And when the bill for McCleary comes due, it's gonna be even less popular. Spoken like a true tool. Everybody I know would like to pay our teachers what they deserve, but then, I hang with a better class of folk.

Write him. Just because he's a sponsor doesn't mean he's working on it or gives a shit about it. If they don't get enough tallies in the 'whining constituents' column, they tend to drop the project and go on to bigger and better things. You've got to keep these folks focused - they're like cats. Break out the laser pointer!

That's right - good catch. national security and civil liberties can involve a bit of triangulation, especially when the NSA directors lies under oath right to your face. That tends to make a lawmaker a bit less generous about handing out the power popsicles. Sec 215 was never really used much for 'fighting terrorism'. It was used for the Drug War - and today's current mass surveillance shitshow. Get pissed. This opportunity to roll this action back won't last forever, and our dear Commander in Chief is fighting' it with everything he's got. Make no mistake, Snowden's docs show without a doubt that the NSA's higher ups do not give two shits about your privacy or the 4th - at all. They think that's a quaint anachronism. They used their surveillance toys for everything - stalking ex wives (LOVEINT), digging up dirt on their political enemies - UNICEF and Doctors without Borders to name a couple, spying on Angela, ferreting out foreign corporate intel - everything but foiling a terrorist plot. Yup. Not fucking one. And that's why they're gunnin' for Snowden - he turned a spotlight on these cockroaches. All of this shit is from their own documentation. Harsh! We've been here before with Nixon, only this is T2 level Nixon. Some of us free press, innocent until proven guilty, probable cause types beg to differ. This is what tyranny looks like in 2014. It has a PR firm on retainer and doesn't wear skulls on its lapels. It wears a cute lil stars n stripes.

BTW, speaking of mass surveillance, today's the day we fight back. It only takes a minute: https://thedaywefightback.org/?r=aclu&etname=140208+The+Day+We+Fight+Back+Email+2&etjid=1268402

HB 1771 and SB 6172. Kind sorta the same, although the amendment process can recombine the DNA a bit on occasion. No regulation of drones now. Anything goes! Local and state approval of drone acquisition and use. Warrants required when personal info collected by law enforcement. Emergency use (firefighting, SAR, etc) OK - minimize personal info collection (SAR victim ID, etc) but no warrant required. No weapons. Or maybe weapons. Stay tuned on that one. Don't know how drone delivered avi bombs would fit in, but I suspect the ski patrollers might want to eliminate the competition for their understandably favorite past time.

I forget.

Fashion a snow saucer into a helmet and have your SO drop a rock on you while you sleep on occasion and you should be good to go.

The senate drone bill made it out of the rules committee, where such tings are usually kilt, so there's that. Spoke to Senators Kohl Welles (D) and Pearson ®. Our lobbyist had just shoveled an earful into the latter, who kindly advised him on a workable strategy to navigate the Rs, but proof is in the pudding. That meeting was kind of like following George Carlin with a stupid pet trick act, but thas coo. Rep Kristiansen was on the floor during the meeting slot, but that support's pretty solid. All of them were focused on other bills at present. D Po-lice are fightin it - it's surprising that some Rs are buckin' em, but we may wind up having to take the 'no weapons' provision out. You heard that right - a whole bunch of folks want domestic weaponized drones. Drop your Sens and Rep a line to let em know how you feel about totally unregulated use of weaponized drones in a town near you. A stayed up all night trying, unsuccessfully, to eject the toxic teriyaki and katsu i'd wolfed the afternoon before from my sweaty shivering carcass - had to curl up on the bathroom floor for the night - but sometime around dawn the Drol Susej called for a cessation of dry-heavin' hostilities just before I gazed heavenward and utter "My Dog, My Dog, why have you forsaken me?" There's another bill floating around about hobby drones - bit of a shitshow that one, and totally different from the bills I've mentioned which deal only with gubbmint drone acquisition and use. Inslee's death penalty moratorium was a chocolate covered blowjob that happily eclipsed today's robo-festivities. The guy's really stand up in my book. Because consider this: dead men and drones never forget, nor do they forgive. Never. Ever. I'm not gonna say it again. Ever.

Major opponent is Boeing, maker of drones. In separate discussions, the ACLU seeks to convince Boeing that regulating drones, and thus making the public comfortable with their use (they are useful, after all), is good business. Their sales will suffer if drones are banned or their use severely regulated after they are inevitably misused in a regulatory vacuum. It's all about the love, ya know?

Maybe, but a healthy fear of slippery slopes (left and right) provides a useful tension. As for the drones and phones and NSA and all the other bullshit, I think anything less than a constitutional amendment is leaving free a door that swings wide with each new administration. Especially since recent execs (GW and BO) have grown fond of signing statements and other bizarre interpretations of Congressional legislation. Constitutional amendment? We've got the 4th Amendment already. I'm leading a team to lobby for the govt. drone regulation bill in Olympia tomorrow: HB 1771 and SB 6172 do not ban drones—they simply ensure that the policy debate around them happens before the drones are actually deployed, and set reasonable, common sense limits on their most invasive uses. The bill requires local or state government approval before an agency acquires drones. Law enforcement can use drones during emergencies, and for missions that don’t involve collecting personal information or routine regulatory enforcement, but otherwise would need a warrant. Exemptions included in the bill would allow useful operations such as exercises over military bases, fire control, search and rescue, or research operations, among others. Drones cannot carry weapons, and personal data would be deleted unless criminal activity is shown. Agencies would report how and for what purpose their drones are being used. At its heart, the bill seeks to prohibit suspicionless fishing expeditions by government agencies that use drones to conduct generalized surveillance with no suspicion of wrongdoing.

The whole Hitler thing has kind of lost its cache here, given the current wave of 'The Fall' reduxz, Springtime for Hitler, you name it. That very same irreverence was rampant during WWII - it's nothing new. Irreverence and humor strips these buffoons, and their present day wannabes, of their power. Over-sensitivity to their presence or mention hands that power back to them. Censorship, in any form, is exactly the kind of world they were gunnin' for. Fuck you NSA, fuck you B of A, fuck you AMA, and, what the hell, fuck you AAA. In a free society, any and every form of expression goes, even if, and especially if, it insults part of the populace. That's how myths, especially 'cherished' ones, get their long overdue shitcanning. Clearly, the way we're doing things right now is a dead end in a bunch of ways, and a larger and larger part of the populace is realizing just how fucked our thinking has been for long time. Welcome to the age of myth-killin.

Better stick with the glove slap - bronze is some solid shit. I was hoping for Saddam's St. Francis of Assisi pose for my hood, but Chubcheeks here blows him right out of the Tigris. Hitler would rock it pretty hard. Endless source of dress-up material there, starting with the Goering Collection - taken in a bit. Dog lover, vegetarian, cafe aficionado - stick him in a Prius and it would probably be a year before anyone even noticed his arrival. I always thought a big ole bronze o Robert E. Lee On Horseback plopped smack dab in the middle of the Sculpture Park might freshen things up a bit.