tvashtarkatena

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.

2 years ago a friend's wife died of cancer. Less than 3 weeks later he dropped dead of a heart attack on his front lawn. The event orphaned their children. Being kicked out of college decades ago probably sucked. One must put things in perspective, however. Is your life/health or that of a loved one directly threatened? Were you raped when you were a child by people assigned to care for you? Did you not see your beloved mother for 5 years because she was deported when you were 13? I know people in all if these categories - today, not decades ago. Again, forgive me if I'm not as sympathetic to the harms you've suffered at the hands of those damned commies, GGK, but it seems like you're actually doing pretty well by comparison. I suspect you appreciate that at some level. I don't presume to know. But as far as your stories of the old country - again, everybody got something they've dealt or are dealing with. You might consider that before repeating your great grand uncle story from 1940 for the nth time. I can't go back and kill Stalin for your great grand uncle. Given that Stalin's forces were the primary reason for Germany's defeat, I'm not sure that would have resulted in a better outcome overall. I can't cure cancer or prevent heart attacks. I can't prosecute the priests that molested my grade school pals (they did go to prison - and, of course, few in the parish believed they were guilty). I can help prevent teens from having their mothers deported and families torn apart, however - as a very small part of a much larger concerted effort. All of us can do more than we realize to create the future we want. Not one of us can do anything at all about the past.

Actually I was, so fuck you very much. I was born and raised in a communist country, I have a political refugee status. My grand uncle was killed in 1940 in Ostaszkow, my grandfather served 10 years on death row (lucky for him stalin died first). My father was fired and demoted in his workplace 2 times, because he refused to become a party member. I was kicked out of college, because of my political views, so excuse me if I don't share your fucked opinion. Yeah, and my folks suffered a litany of horrors due to their poverty while growing up. Welcome to the club. Each society serves up its own brand of nastiness. You'll forgive me if I seem unmoved - but its 2014. I have little patience for people who dwell on the past and hang on to their hate as a result - the whole victimhood thing. The world has all of that it can use already. It doesn't make for a better future-quite the opposite. Action relevant to what's happening today does, however. And its that kind of action that often provides a constructive conduit for all that negative energy. And that requires a sense of humor, because things don't always work out the way you want. You're probably not used to people shrugging off your stories about your great grand uncle 74 years ago - but everybody's got stories of their own. You may view my indifference as ill intentioned. It is anything but.

If all art that insulted somebody, somewhere, were censored, we'd be limited to statues of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Oh, wait... Good art shakes you out of your droll existence a bit. It excites you - sometimes uncomfortably. It lays new neural pathways in its viewers. I'd say Vlad qualifies as great art in GGK's view. For every GGK, there's a true believer who calls for censorship of Piss Christ, a prude who wants Murakami's figures broken up...in a world of 7 billion hairless monkeys, everything insults someone somewhere. Who turns that around? Yup, that's right - its up to the insulted to figure that one out, not the rest of us.

This was established already after 1917 soviet revolution, so if you are so worried about NSA, you should thank vladimir for breaking the trail and showing NSA how it's done. So by this way of thinking even one more reason to remove this mother fucker. BTW, this continues to this day, by installing cameras in hotel rooms and even bathrooms in Sochi, so GRU can spy on visiting foreigners. BTW, by your mentality why not built a monument to bin laden in NYC? Yes, this syphilitic mother fucker is offensive, as a large part of my family was deported in 1939 to Kazakhstan, and my grandfather spent several years in prison . So fuck your statement asshole. Yeah, and my peeps were persecuted by the English, but you don't see me wasting my time burnin' effigies of Oliver Cromwell. I wasn't there. Neither were you. We only have the present and the future. The past is gone. Trying to make right what cannot be made right is an impossibility - and the revenge such a mentality often calls for is a formula for perpetuated human misery. Look forward, Angel. Plenty of shit to do right now to try to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again. There are things that piss you off, sure, but then again there are things that constitute very real threats to a free society - the one we supposedly live in right now. Insults and Threats are two very different things. One chooses to be insulted. You choose to be insulted by Lenin. Many do not. Same damn statue. One does not chose to be threatened. That's the end of the playing field where the most action is needed. I can provide some specific actions you can take, today, that will substantively help prevent totalitarianism from growing right here at home.

The NSA - dustin' off the Espionage Act of 1917, one whistleblower at a time. With a $52 B a year surveillance budget (yup, you read that right), they've got a lot to lose - as do the tech companies most of them will go to work for eventually. National Security? As the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board discovered through the most in depth study of the use of their new toys and powers to date just last month - not so much. Not even one terrorist attack foiled, actually. Goose egg. Nada. They told us different the year before, what was that number -= 53 or 54 terrorist plots foiled? but then, Clapper told Congress and the public under oath there was no surveillance program at all, too. And Snowden's the one being charged? Hmmmm.

A modification which has likely been made already, as have so many others. The first thing folks started doing to Vlad after the idiot protests died down was to play dress up. GIANT LENIN = FUN.

Hey, GGK, while you're worried about how offensive Vlad is to ya, what have you done to roll back the world's most sophisticated and invasive surveillance state in history right here in the good ole U S of A?

Those uber wise Israelis are trying to criminalize the word NAZI. That should free up about half the UBB bandwidth there. And kill their porn industry - which is noted for its plethora of brown mini skirted, jack booted ass divas. Give a hairless monkey a taboo... BAN TOTALITARIANISM!

I'd take a novice up Eldo - nice to throw a little exposure in the mix, but not Argonaut, or any other steep couloir, for that matter. One balled up crampon and everything changes. What's second nature to a lot of folks here is not to a novice. One's first few experiences in a new environment are where accidents are most likely to happen. I subscribe to the 'keep it fun and mellow at first' philosophy for introducing people to the mountains. Take your cue from the novice as to how fast they want to get into it rather than trying to shortcut them to your level. Many novices choose to challenge themselves, given the chance. Others need a bit more time. Offering a menu of options helps keep it fun and better fits the learning curve to the individual. A little exposure goes a long way. A lot of exposure up front can wind up being counterproductive and dangerous.

How's his self arrest skills? Some of the routes suggested here require a climber to be very solid in that category unless you're planning on pitching out the steep bits. I wouldn't take a snow novice on them, personally, but you know your son better than any of us. You might figure out what the steepest slope angle you're willing to travel on at this point and compare that against the topo of your proposed objectives. NE butt of Goode, for example. There can be some really technical snow/schrund/moat climbing to get on that thing, particularly in a low snow year, and the gully descent is loose and dangerous. Moderate for an experienced climber, sure, but it's a long day unless you can simul most or all of it and cruise through the glacier at the bottom - not a given. Moderate glaciated/Snowy peaks: Shuksan, Baker, Ruth, Icy, ,Clark Mt + Buck (same area), Eldorado + Sahale + Buckner (S side)+ Booker, Bonanza (out of Holden), Chiwawa, Daniel Gl, Colchuck (gl), Rainier (emmons), Black, Sloan, Gilbert (Goat Rocks), Vesper (5.6 route), Adams (S spur - not glaciated but plenty snow), St. Helens (same as Adams), Silverstar (gl) all come mind.

Thanks!

Fini's got a perfect spot for Saddam, not that the old rusty air raid siren doesn't already rock it - leave it to the US Army to fuck up a timeless treasure on their way to a Burger King.