Devils Tower

Devils Tower - El Matador

Sandra and I spent six days climbing at Devils Tower in the last week of May 2009. Below are photos from the trip.


Standing on the belay ledge at the bottom of the second pitch of El Matador (10d). Here, we are 80 feet of the deck, which is the length of the first pitch.


Climbing above my second piece on El Matador. The first half of this pitch is mostly hand jams and finger jams with a little liebacking.






Shaking out the forearms which are starting to feel pumped.


Choosing a piece of pro to plug into the crack.


Unbeknownst to me, a small herd of tourists had gathered to watch me battle with El Matador.


About 2/3 of the way up this 130 foot pitch the crack becomes discontinuous, but the chimney narrows enough that you can start stemming between the sides. This is brutal on the calves and mine were howling.


More stemming...


More stemming...


More stemming...


More stemming

Obama Designed Socialist Cars

I drove past this spoof of Obama's auto policy and intentions for the government owned automakers. I found this so terribly amusing that I turned around to stop at take a picture. This person had set this up at the end of their driveway on a country road in rural Indiana. I guess those red state hicks are not a dumb as the mainstream media makes them out to be. This person see exactly where Obama is going with his policy to cram Americans into tiny green mobiles.

Analysis of 5/19/09 California Proposition Results

Link to county by county map of returns for each proposition
http://projects.latimes.com/elections/2009-05-19/california-propositions/results/map/

My not so scientific analysis of the country by county votes. I did this my analyzing the county by county map in the link above. I was curious about how different areas of the state tend to vote.

Prop1A – Rainy Day Fund(34% Yes, 66% No)
Counties that voted more than 40% Yes: Sonoma, Yolo, Marin, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Alameda, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Imperial (south eastern most)

Purpose: in addition to creating a so called rainy day fund, the measure would have extended billions of dollars of tax increases on sales, income, and vehicle taxes for up to two years.

Prop1B – Education Funding (38% Yes, 62% No)
Santa Clara was the only county to vote Yes. Many counties were very close to a Yes on this measure.

Purpose: To claw back recent cuts in funding for education. Obviously, this was supported by the California Teachers Assn.

Prop1C – Modernize Lottery (35% Yes, 65% No)
All counties voted No. Voting against this was more widespread, although states that voted agiast it most strongly tended to be away from the coast and non-greater Bay Area. Imperial County in south eastern California was an outlier again. It voted 47% Yes 53% No.

Purpose: To allow state officials to borrow $5 billion against future lottery earnings.

Prop1D – Child Services Funding (34% Yes, 66% No)
All counties voted No. Voting pattern similar to Prop1C

Purpose: To shift about $1.7B away from early childhood development programs to balance the state’s budget. I have no idea what “childhood development” is.

Prop1E – Mental Health Budget (34% Yes, 66% No)
All counties voted No. Voting pattern similar to Prop1C

Purpose: To temporarily shift money away from a mental health program established by voters in 2004, paid for with a 1% tax on personal income above $1 million.

Prop1F – Elected Official Salaries (74% Yes, 26% No)
All counties voted Yes. This prop differed from the other props in that a Yes vote was a vote agaist the government and against higher taxes. Interestingly, Imperial county, which tented to have a very strong Yes vote on all of the other props, voted 75% Yes for 1F. Contrary to what I expected, many of the Bay Area counties with had the strongest Yes votes for the other props, had very strong Yes votes for this proposition.

Purpose: To prevent pay raises for legislators and statewide officeholders in deficit years.

I did not vote in the recent proposition contest in California as I am leaving the state soon and I could care less. Part of the reason I am leaving the state is that I cannot stand the high tax rates, from the sales tax, to the income tax, to parking tickets, to speeding tickets, to the cost of living out here. However, I do find the results interesting.

New York Tax Receipts

New York state reported an astounding 44% year over year decline in tax revenues in April versus a national average decline of 13%.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601015&sid=aePqq4foFyxE&refer=munibonds

Bastiat and The Law

I read The Law by Frederick Bastiat after hearing Walter Williams, an economist at George Mason University, quote from it while guest hosting the Limbaugh Program. The thesis of this panthlet sized treatise is that socialism perverts law from its proper purpose of protecting the rights of man to plundering wealth. The Law is well written and easy to comprehend. It is fairly unique in that it attacks socialism from that standpoint that it is a perversion of the law. It traces how laws are used to rob citizens of their rightful income. What I find particularly effective about the book is Bastiat's talent of extrapolating the logical consequences of socialist policies and following them to their absurd conclusions, thus bending them back on themselves.

Below, I have typed out passages that I underlined because I found they succictly illustrated an important point.

On Legal Plunder...

But how is legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it away to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime

The present day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.

I like the phrase that points out that socialism is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else. It illustrates the absurdity of the socialist claim. I like to joke, that here in California where I currently live, that the state is going to tax us into prosperity.

Socialism is legal plunder...

Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon.

The humanitarian in thought is the terrorist in action...

It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted...This is greatly due to a fatal desire - learned from the teachings of antiquity - that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy...

They think only of subjecting mankind to the philanthropic tyranny of their own social inventions. Like Rousseau, they desire to force mankind docilely to bear this yoke of the public welfare that they have dreamed up in their own imaginations.

This bit makes me think of the Green movement, and how the members of it want to impose on the rest of us a lifestyle and set of ethics they have arbitrarily made up. Cars a bad. Hybrids cars are good. Organic is good. Cheap is bad. Higher priced gasoline is good. Higher priced energy is good. Eating cold food is good because it uses less energy. It goes on and on and on. The commonality of all of this is that it flies in the face of what most human beings want, which is goods that are more affordable that make lives easier and more pleasant.

This next quote may not make a lot of sense taken out of the lead in to it, but it makes sense to me...

The strange phenomenon of our times - one, which will probably astound out descendants - is the doctrine based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator. These three ideas form the sacred symbol of those who proclaim themselves totally democratic.

Here, he is attacking the idea that mankind does not have an inherent nature, that it is like soft clay in the hands of a sculptor. The fact of the matter is that humans do have an inherent nature that cannot be changed. Every individual has his own thoughts, wishes, goals, likes, and dislikes, and we are not particles waiting to be organized by some enlightened ruler. Related to this is that socialists implicitly assume that the government, or those who run it are infallible. Obviously, this is not the case, but socialism does rest on this tenant.

Chart of Consumer Credit Since 1950

This is a chart of consumer credit excluding loans backed by real estate since 1950. Source is Federal Reserve and Bloomberg. Debt can be reduced in two ways: paying it down and defaulting on it. I think we have some more delevering of the economy to go coupled with a longer recession than what I see being predicted in the news on average.