el jefe

i thought when i heard you boast about being john frieh's "favorite partner" it meant you didn't like girls...

well, in order to become czar, you are going to have to talk to JosephH because he is the one who decides who gets to be climbing czar. next question: is this place called "the lack" because it lacks bolts?

"Call me a youth groping and grasping to a time and when climbing was an adventure; NOT a homogenous and antiseptics effort to cater to the lowest common denominator." okay, you're a groping and grasping youth -- just don't grope my daughter and everything will be fine. ca 1920 or so the british climbing community decried the german invention of the carabiner because it robbed the sport of adventure. before the 'biner, the leader had to untie, thread his rope through the eye of the piton, then tie back in. i'm okay with using 'biners and i suspect you use them, too. where would you like to arbitrarily turn the clock back to in your search for adventure? my point here is that we all decide for ourselves what level of adventure interests/intrigues/draws us. you want to follow leo houlding, fine by me. i could care less what leo says. i'll make my own decision, thank you. i'm certainly okay with the idea that "the lack" is a trad area with its weird no bolt anchors ethic. to each his own, let the local community decide for itself. it would never occur to me to go into someone else's area and impose my ideas on them. i just find the pompous attitude that it is so clean and pure and shouldn't everyone aspire to this standard so much malarkey. clean and pure because it got no bolts and bolts is all bad always, evil stuff, cams good because "natural" -- so simple to be dogmatic, so much harder to actually think about the choices we make. at the smoke bluffs people used trees for rap anchors for decades, then decided after learning that they were harming the trees that bolt anchors were a better idea. pluses and minuses to either option, but at least put some thought into it. don't just quote some pothead brit. so at this adventurous crag with no bolts -- were routes cleaned on lead or on toprope? is the pro really sketchy, requiring genuine boldness, or is it bomber and you can sew it up, a cam every 3 feet in a crack that was meticulously cleaned on rappel, inspected as to what size gear was necessary prior to its "adventurous" first ascent?

what a load of pompous bullshit. are you speaking for all climbers or is that the royal "we" you are using? you joke about being climbing czar but...

There are only a couple (two I believe) designated rap trees the rest are webbing free. Moss grows back, trails grow over, and 100+foot tall several feet wide tree are not going to be strangled by webbing. I see trees that over grow barbed wire all over the place, this is just webbing. But....bolt holes and bolts are not overgrown by the rock. ask an arborist whether wrapping slings around trees is harmless. the moss isn't going to grow back as long as people keep climbing there, nor will the trails grow over as long as people keep using them to get to the crag. the point is that human activity changes things, so if you want it to remain "natural", then you have to ban all activity and close the place to climbing. you guys are a laugh. you think you are so pure because you aren't using bolts but you are still changing the environment. the carbon footprint of manufacturing trad gear has to be greater than that of manufacturing what you need to climb a sport route (the bolts are reused by every climber who does the route whereas trad route requires everyone to have their own equipment). the "capitalistic" climbing gear industry makes a lot more money selling you a cam than it does selling you a quickdraw, yet somehow the cam is some sort of anti-capitalist thing and the quickdraw is selling out to the man. like i said, what a load of bs...

joseph, i'd say that, as per usual, it was you who didn't get the joke. luvshaker, i can't imagine anything more tedious or pointless than another bolting discussion. apparently scrubbing moss, building trails, and strangling trees with webbing are all activities deemed "natural", but putting in a nice bolt anchor that would protect the trees from abuse is somehow "capitlistic". what a load of bs...

Bill, did I miss something? Why do I suddenly feel like Geronimo on Columbus Day... anyone surprised by the fact that joseph is ignorant of what is happening in the larger world outside the backwater of beacon rock?

is this another one of those "bolts aren't natural" spiels? like cams and stoppers aren't manmade artifacts just like bolts, every bit as much a product of the capitalistic interests of the rock climbing industry? like said capitalists aren't probably more interested in selling all of us multiple sets of expensive camming devices rather than a mere 10 quickdraws each? the rediscovery of trad climbing has been a good thing for the bottom line of the capitalists because now they get to sell more toys. no bolts would be good for the capitalistic climbing industry.

climbing pictures are always a good idea, bill. let's see more of them.

from this thread it looks like one could quibble endlessly with the studies comparing the quality of health care delivered in the u.s. relative to that delivered in other first world countries, but the thing i find interesting is that the neither the citizens nor the politicians of these other countries are talking about scrapping their systems in favor of one organized like ours. if the u.s. system was delivering the results its proponents claim, then it seems likely that someone somewhere in the developed world would be interested in adopting it, and that just isn't the case.

i think this argument is specious, jayb. canadian diets and habits aren't that different from ours and traumatic injuries (gunshot wounds, stabbings, etc -- homicides are usually the result of penetrating trauma) are considered a public health issue, so the comparison is still valid as a measure of the effectiveness of a health care delivery system. infant mortality is higher in the u.s. than canada as well -- do you think homicide rates matter as far as this is concerned? are u.s. infants more likely to smoke cigarettes? is canadian breast milk healthier than american? give me a break. we're talking about statistics based upon populations measured in the millions. you just don't want to believe the data because it doesn't support your ideology.

"Do you disagree that hospital billing practices represent an effort to shift costs from parties who don't pay the full cost of their care onto those who can?" of course hospitals shift the cost of providing care for those who don't pay onto those who do -- what choice do they have? the law requires hospitals to provide a medical screening exam to anyone who shows up seeking care and to treat accordingly or, if they lack the specialized resources/technology/staff necessary to provide care, then they have to arrange transfer to a center that has the resources necessary to treat. it is illegal to turn away someone seeking care or to refuse care regardless of whether the person seeking care can pay or will pay. yet at the same time, the hospital doesn't get its resources (staff, equipment, electricity, etc) for free, so how do you make the books balance? the only recourse is to jack up the prices and thus shift cost for unreimbursed care onto those who do pay.

"And the rightwing mantra of "leave medicine to the doctors, not the gov't" - what utter bullshit - these are the same clowns who took over, raped, and all but destroyed our medical system in the '80s and '90s with 'managed care'. The republicans explicitly didn't want doctors making medical decisions - they manufactured a system which explicitly took decision-making out of doctor's hands and gave it to insurance companies." let's use the complete statement if you are going to quote from it, jayb. seems to me that joseph is saying that rightwing shills used fear of guvmint bureaucrats restricting treatment options as a smokescreen to shift this power to corporate bureaucrats instead. try going to a specialist who is "outside" your hmo, ppo, or whatever and you'll find it isn't covered -- in other words, your treatment options are being limited. myself, i'd rather this decision be made by the government bureaucrats because i can, at least on some level, influence that decision by how i vote. corporate bureaucrats, on the other hand, have the best interests of the corporation in mind, not the public interest.

nurse.

my point was that there is no one to blame here and certainly not the canadian health care system. an epidural bleed can kill very quickly but is also a completely inobvious injury until it is too late. using this tragic, unfortunate event as an argument against a single-payer health care system is crass, opportunistic, and in extremely poor taste.

also note the bogus argument that uses reported 8 hours to get a broken arm fixed as evidence that the canadian health care system would also be slow to properly manage a patient with a severe traumatic brain injury: this assumes that broken heads and broken arms are managed the same way. comparing apples with oranges, as they say.

do you have a source for this "20 min affair, if that" claim? can't say i've ever seen a broken arm managed that quickly in any emergency dept i've worked in. perhaps your "8 solid hours" in canada was caused by people with real emergencies (e.g., myocardial infarction, potential stroke, seizures) being treated before your friend got treated. emergency department operates according to the principle that the sickest people-- those with potentially life-threatening complaints -- get treated first, those without life-threatening problems (e.g., broken arm with pulses intact distal to the site of injury) get treated when time is available, and that's true regardless of whether health care is organized according to a single-payer or multipayer system. restaurants operate according to the "first come, first served" principle but emergency rooms don't because there is a profound difference between delivering health care and serving big macs. having to wait in the emergency room for care is usually a good thing. it means you aren't about to die or lose a limb. it means you aren't very sick or too badly hurt.

she made the wrong choice, but then there was no way for her to know that at the time. epidural hemorrhage is caused by an arterial injury so at first there is nothing wrong (hard blow to the head but patient quickly recovers as no brain damage caused by initial event), then a rapidly accumulating lesion (artery is a high pressure system) results in rapid neurological deterioration. bad luck was the culprit. any delay with this sort of injury is bad but it is also insidious injury because once it becomes apparent from clinical presentation that something is wrong, then the neurosurgeon needs to be standing right there at that moment if disaster is to be averted. single-payer health care system had nothing to do with the outcome.

billcoe's source article from the ny post is the usual highly slanted bullshit expected from that rag. joseph is one the money. the issue with an epidural is getting the patient into the hands of a neurosurgeon asap. this can happen fairly quickly in an urban, heavily populated area like portland or seattle but neurosurgeon availability in rural areas throughout the u.s. is very poor. even getting a patient with a bad head injury from mt hood to portland takes much longer than most people realize despite the fact that helicopter transport exists in this area. first of all, the helicopter isn't stationed at the ski area so there is the time it would take to get to the mountain, the time to pick up the patient, then the flight to pdx -- all assuming that the weather is clear and the chopper can actually fly all the way to the mountain. many times this isn't possible and a patient has to be shipped at least part way by ambulance, etc. add a 3 hour delay caused by patient refusal of care and the outcome is the same as for poor natasha. hers was a tragic case to be sure but hardly the result of the canadian healthcare system as the same outcome would likely have occurred in the u.s.

found this on rockclimbing.com: "We are flat, the only climbing here comes from plastic, and the occasional building. There's apparently one exposed rock in the state around Alexandria." sounds pretty grim. you'll probably be driving/flying to tennessee or arkansas for rock climbing. ice climbing is somewhat farther away.

thanks for your hard work in this regard, joseph. losing access to a climbing area is always a bad thing. hoping this turns out okay in the end.

which idiot did you have in mind? if they start banning idiots here then no one will be allowed to post.

i suspect lots of people told mama beckey she should keep those boys close to her skirts. this would have been normal at any time. that she was unable/unwilling to do so is another matter entirely. in any event, the comparison of the beckey boys going off to waddington with the question of marc and braydon going to pumori misses the point entirely. marc and braydon are ambitious, no doubt, and judging from what i've read here at cc.com (since i've never met either of them) are already on the path to becoming highly skilled all-arounders, so why this sudden desire to plunk down a boatload of cash to be guided up a big himalayan peak like newbies rather than develop the skillset necessary to undertake this sort of climb on their own? fred and helmy went out and gathered some experience in the mountains, then made the leap to a bigger mountain based on the experience they had acquired firsthand; on the other hand, marc and braydon are talking about buying someone else's experience, which is kind of like getting an honorary degree from some university because you made a big donation -- yes, you get the sheepskin, but you still don't know shit and everyone knows it. the question is: who do you want to be? do you want to be known as the kids who figured out a way to buy the summit of pumori or do you want to be climbers?

if i spent my sunday grading papers, i'd curse when i read, too.

something more than "a cursory reading", off white, would reveal jmo engaged in his usual tactic of setting up a straw man argument in order to disseminate a false interpretation of events, working under the guise of "trying to have civil political debate". his "he's no messiah" thread is another example of the same tactic. this guy deliberately misinterprets events in order to push his agenda, then pretends those who call him on his bullshit are unwilling to engage in a "civil political debate". he considers it "uncivil" to be confronted with the facts. "civil" behavior, on the other hand, is to accept his false assumption and debate an imaginary issue that misses the real point. in this case, jmo wants to "discuss" the obama administration's attempts to limit rush limbaugh's right to free speech -- how unethical for people on the government payroll" to do this! the truth, however, is that the democratic administration is promoting the idea that rush is the voice of the republican party and, as a consequence, they are actually encouraging limbaugh to exercise his right to speak his mind. certainly there isn't anything unethical about those on the govt payroll encouraging a citizen to exercise his right to free speech.