tvashtarkatena

Yeah, an, an, I heard one time that in San Francisco, straight kids with gay sounding names are being forced to read "Our Hearts, Our Bodies, Ourselves" while watching German shiza flicks.

I jutht drank a Dr. Pepper, too.

I'm a loather baby, tho why doncha kill me....

Not much. Heston never made much of a real difference either way. He was fun for media fodder, that's about it. What amuses me are the morons here who actually think that his panderants had any quality, sincerity, or valid messages to them. Independent thought and action never had a worse spokesman. Oh well. The world's a tough place. It's a tougher place when you're stupid.

Yes. Citing anomolous, irrelevant and probably made up factoids plucked from Somewhere Out There In America to support a myth as broad as the 'Culture War' is propagandizing, whether or not the speaker actually believes his own bullshit or not. It's the oldest trick in the book. Make shit up, get 'em outraged...over nothing. Essentially, Heston's message was the 'Reglar White Guy Under Siege' bullshit, plucked from Founding Father's Fairyland where the LAPD is always polite and helpful, date rape is just the bitch changing her mind afterwards, and Free Speech is sacrosanct,...unless you're Ice T or anyone else who doesn't seem to live in your mythical, Main Street USA America (and who has the audacity to poke fun at such free speech advocates as Tipper Gore) of course. One great thing about Heston's speeches; they were self contained. No Q and A required. His examples contradicted his positions far better than any detractors ever could.

I'm suddenly very concerned about the Antioch College student manual. It's a Culture War, man! Heston. What an propagandizing asshat.

The U.S. should come to Taiwan's military aid should the Chinese invade. I, for one, do not want to see 'Made in Taiwan' become 'Made in China' on my purchases.

Well thats good to hear about Trash. I will say in my defense, that my post wasn't an analysis though, it was stating facts which I know from first hand experience. The Taiwan invasion within 5 years thing I got from a Chi-Com party member who was shocked that it was new "news" to me, I reconfirmed it with a few other English speaking Chinese while visiting that country last year. Their defense posture re-confirms it: like mainland China loading up more and more on offensive missiles near the straits, pointing at Taiwan. Last public count was over 400, whereas a few years ago, there were none, and no reason for any now. As far as if the US would get involved, too many variables to list, however, most likely we would, and as I knocked heads describing this result to the Communist part member, it would result in many, many of her's and my countrymen dead. I could tell that she was not mentally prepared for a brutal war and US involvement: thats how they are rolling on the subject now anyway, just so you know. They think it will be a cakewalk, much like when they rolled Tibet, and we will stay out. An invasion of Taiwan is sooooo 2004. That's about when analysts at Brookings and the Naval War College and elsewhere started spouting off about such a possibility...to be completed and cleaned up before that 2008 Olympics, of course. Well, that window of opportunity has closed. Maybe next time.

Just ordered some skins for my funky little backcountry skiboards. Great little shop to work with; very responsive, personal service, and very good prices. Stock up for the spring corn! Check it: Climbingskinsdirect.com Just got the skins. They threw in a free block of skin wax.

The point of maximum tensile stress on a pick is at the ice surface/bottom of the pick. In softer ice, this might coincide with the groove between the 4th and 5th tooth on BD picks (where the tooth depth increases). It seems, though, that there also needs to be a stress concentrator at that point that is unique to BD, because the cross sectional geometry of BD picks at that point insn't significantly different from Petzl's. Forging anomaly? Either that or their steel is just that much weaker. Or both. Or who knows? In any case, a broken pick can mean pain or death. Fuck that. I'm 'sticking' with Petzl.

I would submit you don't know a damn thing what the Chinese leadership is preparing for or not, so that is worthless speculation on your part. I suspect otherwise, based on obvious evidence seen daily, but have no interest in researching it for you. The fact is: China is currently actively and openly preparing for war with Taiwan. They have a 4+ year count down to war time frame which they have announced internally. This has not been publicized or discussed by our gov't for public consumption here as it would give us less wiggle room diplomatically. Do you not wonder what the US will do when this inevitably occurs? Shockingly: most other countries in SE Asia currently believe that China would currently win a war with the US. This will become more pronounced as they increase their capabilities via the transfer of dollars from consumers. The Chinese should be our allies, yet our hegemony and various poor forigon policy blunders scares them. I suspect that a conflict over resources will sadly occur eventually, as it did with Japan during WW2. A five year old could produce a better analysis than this. Perhaps one did.

Here's some more logic: Our biggest rival in the world today is? China. Chance right now for war with China is? Not very high. Why? China, despite it's large population, has a relatively diminutive military with very little power projection capability. It's not a threat. If China were to 'prepare for war' with the United States, how do you think the U.S. would respond and would the chances of an actual conflict increase or decrease? Hmmmm...that's a tough one.....

The nuclear arms race did not result in a nuclear war, or even a major conventional conflict, which is what Einstein was warning against with that quotation. Phony logic, intellectually equivalent to the oft stated "well, we haven't had an attack on Americans on our soil since 911 (just many, many attacks on foreign soil on Americans...and Europeans, and Pakistanis, and...) so the War on Terror must be working." The nuclear arms race came VERY CLOSE to a nuclear exchange on several occasions. The fact that such a catastrophe didn't happen was more dumb luck than anything. The Cold War was a really fucking dangerous, hair trigger situation for many, many years that led to many tragic and costly conventional wars, including, most notably, America's debacle in Vietnam. Here's some sounder logic: had neither country possessed a nuclear arsenal, than such an exchange would have remained impossible. Next....

Look - it's a trained rightwing parrot. He's got 4 replies! Oh, the irony. Keep spewing your bullshit cliches. Meanwhile I'll watch as you use the "white" word constantly, and TTK makes racist impressions of Clarence Thomas speaking to Chuck Schumer - among a myriad of other examples. And let's not forget this choice little tidbit--straight off Tvashy's slimy, self righteous keyboard... Seems to me a certain someone needs to come to terms with his inner demons. ...and there are those who might mail order a sense of humor.

The difference in grain structure and strength is dramatic between cold "forged" and actualy hot forged steel. No. With proper design, similar mechanical properties can be achieved through either process through heat treating and surface hardening. Hot forging is particularly useful for creating parts with widely varying thicknesses or more complicated geometries that might otherwise require machining, because you can only deform cold steel so much before degrading the grain structure. Either process can produce 'thin' parts, but if a part has to be thick in one section and thin in another, then hot forging is the preferred way to make it. A poor example. The purpose of a knife blade is to remain sharp. You don't pry anything with a knife blade (if you value your knife). In addition, the knife blades you refer to are typically very high chromium steel, a different animal altogether. In contrast, the purpose of a pick is not to break under bending loads, and, secondarily, to hold a reasonable edge. Stamped/heat treated picks such as Petzl's work wonderfully for this application. Starting with high quality bar stock followed by proper heat treating ensures a uniform, predictable grain structure for the application. Correction: Petzl cold forges most of its crampon parts, not picks. It's Cascade pick is hot forged...I don't know about it's other models. The significant transition in thickness at the attachment end of the pick probably dictates hot forging (which avoids an extra machining step) more than anything.

Another small factor that contributed to our slow start in Europe: we had that little issue in the Pacific....

One thing that should be noted: properly designed steel parts can theoretically have an infinite life under cyclic loading. (the same is not true of aluminum and some other materials). You should expect that a properly cared for pick used only in ice, unless you weight 300 lbs or something, should never break.

Interesting. Some possible root causes: 1) An irregularity in the die at that particular tooth produces too tight a radius and thus, a stress concentration. 2) All the teeth inner radii are too tight, and that tooth just happens to be the point of maximum stress. 3) The overall geometry of the tool's cross section is too small to handle the maximum stress at that particular tooth. 4) Either the cold forging or heat treatment process produce a weakness in the steel's crystalline structure at that tooth. 5) As mentioned above, a shitty lot of product (bad steel, poorly tuned manufacturing process, etc) Any combination of the above.

Chrome moly steel can be had in many forms. It is not all the same. The biggest differences however in picks is the use of CNC plate cutting techniques on the chrome moly and then heat treated to spec or chrome moly hot forgings, heat treated to spec and then hand finished. This is a good short course in steel and manufacturing. http://www.grivelnorthamerica.com/technology.php?gid=1 Easy to guess the one company of the top three tool makers who doesn't use forged picks. There is a small amount of difference in the stress risers incorporated into each company's pick by tooth design. The two design/manufacturing do add up. All three makers 'forge' their picks. Grivel hot forges (die forms the steel when hot) while Petzl and BD cold forge (die form cold, heat to temper afterwards). None of the companies use CNC. They stamp in the logo and other surface feathers, form the edges, and cut out the part in one go with a die. (Look for a little conventional 'clock face' with an arrow pointing to the die number...it's stamped into the pick as well). CNC would be too slow and expensive. Either process can be tuned to produce similar mechanical properties, so, while Grivel chooses to showcase hot forging as a selling point, it's more hype than anything else. Grivel's hot forging process can more readily produce more complex shapes, thus allowing more freedom in designing in weight distribution, but all three produce tools that are nicely weighted, and, ironically, Grivel's tools are typically heavier than then comparable BD or Petzl models. I've also noticed that with some Grivel axes they seem to have neglected much of the extra finish work required after hot forging (presumably to save money, since their process is inherently more expensive), producing an end product with surface irregularities than can lead to unwanted stress concentrations and crack formation. Whether or not this has actually been a problem with their tools, I don't know. In any case, the proof is in the field performance.

Both Petzl and BD use 4340 Ni Cr Mo alloys for their picks, but differences in hardening/tempering/design between the two can produce varying mechanical properties and failure modes.

All this discussion must take place against the backdrop of what was largely a Russian victory in WWII. Remember, they deployed 4 times more divisions during WWII than the rest of the allies combined, and invaded that continent with a similar ratio. What America did or did not do in Europe had little effect on the overall outcome of the war as compared to Hitler and Stalin's decisions. The US was the economic and political victor of WWII, so we crafted and advertised an American but largely innaccurate version of that victory.

No, we should have launched an even bigger invasion of russia just post WWI to eliminate the cold war threat. As Patton stated so well a few years later. Yes, invading Russia. It's been tried before, it seems.

We almost completely eviscerated our military. There's a lot of ground between a "large" military and what we actually had. France and Britain definitely should have maintained a larger military and invaded Germany when they remilitarized the Rheinland, or, at the very least went into Czechoslovakia. You have to draw a line somewhere. The current Iraq war has deep roots in the first war and its incomplete resolution. What if we had not invaded Iraq to drive them out of Kuwait? Where would we be today? Perhaps a situation very similar to WWII. Funny, I remember Bush I and cronies stating that they stopped short of Baghdad to avoid a quagmire. I'm sure they were wrong, though....

Arguing with KKK is so easy. He provides his own rebuttals.

The arms industry is like the wedding industry; it prays on myths based on fundamental emotions; fear in the case of the former, love in the case of the latter. Security applies to both. It's bullshit. We do not have a defensive force and haven't since before WWII. We have an offensive force to project American power around the world to secure our sources of cheap shit. We're not under threat; we ARE the threat. Wait until we really start running out of energy. You're gonna see some fireworks then, boyo.