tvashtarkatena

I'm sorry Don....

More apologies. The price of being too photogenic:

With apologies to Brian

I usually climb with only one other tool.

It's difficult to find talented people who want to sign on to a sinking ship. In addition, the gene pool of people who subscribe to this administration's failed policies is not impressive. The only motivations I can think of for anyone accepting a position in this tragic joke-of-an-administration at this point would be a)serving the party now for future personal gain later and b) accepting a high profile position that would normally be way beyond the candidate's competency level as an upward career move for future personal gain later, or c) bored with retirement/need something to do. I suppose 'mitigating the damage from the inside' might be one, but Bush effectively filters for that. It should come no surprise that Bush appointees and nominees are bottom of the barrel.

Ditto. Tarptent Squall. Floor, bug netting, hoop tent, vestibule. 2 lbs total (ski pole required).

Wasps: Quick to anger, not very bright. I love my groupies.

A high pressure front, to be sure.

I'm going to infect this site with the rage virus.

OK, I'll give you the last word. Oh, wait.

I'm still getting the bottom of post response options (Reply, Quote, etc) in duplicate: one is a button, the other is underlined text. It enrages me.

Pretty realistic battle scenes. The night artillery barrage was artistically done. I couldn't help noticing some striking personality similarities between the high school teacher and the author of this thread, however.

Oops. Correction made.

The only revelant point to this rhetorical hair splitting is that the behavioral differences between species are huge.

No hangover here, but I did go to a good costume party at Prost. The winner (who is granted a free beer a day for a year) by popular demand was dressed as the Spanish Lessons guy at Greenlake. One punker had a very convincing CD embedded in his face sawblade style. "Awareness Lady" was there, covered with ribbons of every color. And of course, the requisite population of sexy nuns, flappers, devilettes, and St. Pauli Girls.

Meditating near ground hornet nests. How...relaxing. They are different species of wasps, just as cheetahs and cougars are different species of cats. I've also passed close to nests in season without being stung. At other times, however, I've been swarmed. Do a long term study for us and publish your results, but you might want to bring your epipen along just in case the little bastards aren't feeling the satori.

nitpicking is so much fun! Hardly a nitpick. The Kyoto protocol, for example, is a non-self executing treaty. It requires further specific legislation to enact it, which the Bush administration has refused to support. It has also not been ratified (ditto). For those two reasons, Kyoto is not part of U.S. law. It would have taken someone like KKK about five seconds to mistakenly post Kyoto as an example of why treaties are 'not law' and therefore do not matter, so I decided to head that one off at the pass and save myself a little time.

I don't respond to that bloviating, jizz-garging, bitch-tit-flaunting, Tiger-mountain-king-kong, self-congratulatory sack of raw sewage. Nice try though. Um, I think you just did. He he.

An oft quoted but bullshit historical analogy. Basically summed up as Saddam = Hitler. Riiiiighhhht. The newest version is Iran = Nazi Germany. FACT: Iran IS pursuing nuclear weapons. I've seen no hard evidence of this. It's been repeated so many times that it has become fact, just like the WMD story. FACT: Iran is provoking the U.S. Really? It seems to me that the overwhelming provocation has come from our side (and the Iraqi Kurds, which have been attacking Iran for years now). FACT: Iran WILL give its nukes to terrorists. Really? Why would that be in Iran's national interest? FACT: Iran with nukes would be a disaster. Really? Pakistan already has them, and it also proliferated nuclear technology to North Korea and other countries hostile to the U.S. for two entire decades. It also has more jihadists per square mile than any other place on earth, yet I see no invasion plans on the table for Pakistan. How would starting WWIII by attacking a country that does not yet have nukes provide greater security again? FACT: Iran is crazy! Why, because I'm-a-dinner-jacket denies the holocaust? Shit, our president believes in the End Times. That's a bit scarier to me, personally. Iran has acted rationally nearly ever step of the way, destruction of Israel rhetoric excepted. They are developing nuclear energy in a world of dwindling oil resources (we are not), they are establishing closer relations with the majority Shiites in Iraq (we are pissing them off), they are establishing close ties with Russia and China. And, if they are developing nukes, that is certainly a rational response to explicit threats from the United States. QUESTION: What will Russia do with it's very real, intercontinental nuclear weapons once we've started WWIII by attacking it's ally Iran? Both the Russians and Chinese will see this as a grab by the U.S. for regional domination, particularly of Iran's huge oil resources. Personally, I think this is the real issue; Iranian nukes serve as yet another smokescreen from an administration that simply can't quit its addiction to spectacularly failed idea of global hegemony. SUGGESTION: Engage Iran in regional talks to pursue the common goal (and it is a common goal) of regional stability. It's amazing to me that the very same people on this forum who voted for Bush and now feel screwed by him are believing the exact same kind of PR campaign that got us into the Iraq fuck up in the first place. Please sir, may I have another?

North Korea never attacked us. Anyway, Illegal War is a bullshit PC liberal term. Legal according to whose laws? An attacked country will never say the war is "legal", now will they? The war in Iraq is just as "legal" as any other war the US has started, or any other country for that matter. Sounds like at least one legal eagle on this forum needs a little refresher on basic U.S. law. Per the U.S. Constitution, treaties ratified by Congress become U.S. law, enforceable in U.S. courts. The U.S. is signatory to the Geneva Conventions, which it also ratified, so that is part of U.S. law. Treaties can be non-self executing (they require further, more specific legislation to be passed to enact them) or non-self executing (they do not; the law is explicitly spelled out in the treaty). The Geneva Conventions (there are 4) are of the latter kind. In a recent example of treaty law in practice, the Supreme Court found the military commissions system at Guantanamo invalid and in violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of detainees just last year(Hamdan v. Rumsfeld). Specifically, the court found that the military commissions system violated the following prohibitions: (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including...those placed hors de combat by…detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely. To this end the following acts are…prohibited at any time and in any place: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; © outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. The Geneva Conventions also prohibit the targeting of and indescriminate killing of civilians, another area of 'controversy' lately. Next time, do your homework, sport. What is reality 'in your mind' doesn't really matter much in the real world.

Victims of these nasty little bastards can take solice in the knowledge that their attackers will all be dead by winter. Winter kills the entire colony, except for one mated queen, who survives to create a new one the following spring.

He he. Too bad for someone, anyway.

Wive's tale about the honey. They're insect eating wasps, so they don't do the honey thing. Their populations start to peak around mid august, so they get really defensive about their nests. This is the time of year when hives split, so everybody in the nest is amped up on pheromones. Perhaps they're just pissed off due to overcrowding and traffic. Who knows?