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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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May 11, 2017 - 09:07am PT
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Guyman
serious question
Were your parents Republicans?
What media do you follow?
You know that you are now in a group of only 36% that approve of Trump
The rest of us think he's the worst disaster EVER
and no one can deny that Trump does not have ties to Russia
just look at the picture above
that is a Tie to Russia, right there
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monolith
climber
state of being
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May 11, 2017 - 09:15am PT
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Few around here will admit to be republicans. They say they are 'independents'.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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May 11, 2017 - 09:17am PT
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The rest of us think he's the worst disaster EVER
Right, snowflake. I'm kinda partial to Kennedy and Johnson for Viet Nam although,
to be fair, both Bushies give 'em a run with their Iraq escapades.
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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May 11, 2017 - 09:24am PT
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Good for you Mr. Independent
or what I call a Republican
I really think it's time to change your avatar
It's really lame
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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May 11, 2017 - 09:31am PT
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I really think it's time to change your avatar
It's really lame
There's no end to the things that get yer knickers bunched, is there?
Are pigeons sitting on gargouilles now politically incorrect? You must
be a real hoot to hang out with!
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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May 11, 2017 - 09:52am PT
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Not so good
Nothing worse than a Far Right Wing Republican One Rule America
The White Nationists are turning the screws on our freedoms
If we only had a true Democracy of the Majority, things would be a lot better IMO
I guess the rest of the world is worried as well
How long do you give the Trumpster Jimmy?
No knickers in a bunch, I just call lameness out when I see it
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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May 11, 2017 - 10:02am PT
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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May 11, 2017 - 11:09am PT
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Impeachment!
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monolith
climber
state of being
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May 11, 2017 - 12:21pm PT
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Trump to justice department: Write me up some reasons to fire Comey.
Trump to press: Justice recommends I fire Comey.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 11, 2017 - 12:22pm PT
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#impeachthetraitor
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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May 11, 2017 - 12:52pm PT
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warning rant following....
Crag F .... to answer your Questions about my parents, not that you have any right to know, or that they had any real impact on me....
My Mom is pretty a political (if thats a word - 6th grade made no impression on me caus there were better things to do - like chase women) Dad, is a died in the wool Republican, Airforce Colonel.... during Viet Nam (you might recall that little crisis for our country) who I would come dam close to having fistfights with at our dinner table back in 67-70.... That stopped when Dad came to the conclusion that the way the whole war was being run was UN-american and designed to waste our valuable brave troops.... and that was being run at that time by Nixon a true Republican.
So I did see that one can change a very deeply held beliefs when confronted with evidence that you can see taste and feel.
I , if you can recall was a hippy dippy climber, just like 95% of our generation was, esp the climbers. As I got older and our country went left to right to back left again I began to see the whole political scene as a sham-a lie- and a big con game to enrich some groups…. And it had nothing to do with “the right thing” as I see it, for the good of “the people”.
But I remained a registered Democrat and didn’t vote for Regan or for Bush …. I voted for President Obama by god! But then I began to see things differently, it seems like the only thing the Democrats wanted was more $$$ TAXES from things like the sugar tax on soft drinks, a extra extra TAX$$$ on fuel and on and on and on… always looking for more $$$ to spend controlling all of US and a totally failed “HEALTH CARE SYSTEM" called “Obama Care” that really cares for nobody. The republicans want to control us too…. Lots of laws to put people in jail for all sorts of stuff, except for those on the inside, they can steal you blind and the law looks the other way.
I only changed to Republican so I could vote for Donald Trump …. The Republicans worst nightmare.
Sooooo …. The way I see it 90% of the Government and its workers are corrupt a-holes who are also incompetent and the only thing they ever care about is who gets the credit, who gets to siphon off $$$$$$$$$ to their friends and causes and the people like me be dammed…. “you just get back to work and make sure you pay those taxes on time…. And next year we will be back for more, because we spent it all and really never got the job done…. “
So yea, I cheer on Donald, I support deporting illegal aliens… esp when they are let out of prison.
I think people should be responsible for the Kids they spawn and their healthcare needs, food, housing, everything.
Lots of screwed up stuff in the good old USA right now but with some swamp draining and some really good political fighting and bloodletting (not real blood mind you… we did that in the civil war) we might just get the parties re-focused – Right and Left – so when you vote for somebody you have a better chance of having them (the person elected) stand for something you believe in…..
I DO hope the Dems go hard left and the REPUBS go hard right in the next election… then we, the American Voters, can do what I think we really want to do and that is to go right down the center.
So please all you lefties who want the Government to try and fix everything, please run Warren or better yet Bernie next go round…
end
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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May 11, 2017 - 01:28pm PT
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Nice rant Guy
thanks
what media do you follow?
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - May 11, 2017 - 02:24pm PT
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Guy, it seems that your problems are not so much with the ideology of the two most popular parties, but with the concept of government employees being corrupt and wasteful. It seems you perceive that the bigger the government and the more taxes collected, the more of this corruption and waste will occur.
I suppose that is true. But it is also true of corporations that would otherwise provide the services that the government could provide. I would rather pay the waste and corruption of the government, than the waste and corruption of a business along with the overhead of shareholder profits and bloated executive salaries.
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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May 11, 2017 - 02:38pm PT
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CF... Radio = KFI, KABC and ESPN
TV... not much but BBC World News tells a pretty straight story.
CNN, CNBC make me want to puke with their slanted take on everything and none of the TV funny men are funny at all.
If I read a newspaper...sometimes on Sunday morning, The Christian Science Monitor, the Valley News and the LA Weekly. My neighbor gets the CSM he lets me read his if I wish.
And Super Topo... I look at a lot of the links, some good some bad.
Nut... you sort of have it, but I trust corporations way more than I trust our government, heck I work for a corporation do you? Or do you pick up a government check?
Name me a corporation that has done more bad things in this world than OUR government.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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May 11, 2017 - 02:49pm PT
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Mr Fry, please enlighten me as to how the Thought Police deem a pigeon on a gargouille lame, especially in comparison with yer stunningly imaginative avatar. I'm genuinely interested in seeing yer rationalizations and I'd really like to see you weasel out of denying that it bunched yer knickers. It caused you to comment on it so either yer knickers have, at the least, an annoying crease, or yer so magnanimous that you couldn't bear to see me belittling myself with bad graphics. That is unless, as I initially surmised, you perceive it as some affront to yer holier-than-thou sensibilities.
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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May 11, 2017 - 02:53pm PT
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It's lame because it doesn't look like it does when you look at it closeup
It looks like that silly monster from an old "Genesis" Video
That was easy
Next question
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - May 11, 2017 - 04:56pm PT
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Name me a corporation that has done more bad things in this world than OUR government.
As I recall a quote from my junior high history teacher, it motivates me to reevaluate my positions:
"Power Corrupts. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely."
I was going to use this argument to rationalize that the USA government has done worse things than corporations only because more power is concentrated in that organization. But that begs the obvious solution to minimize corruption by minimizing power, by distributing it to many small entities (i.e. smaller federal government). That seems right mathematically, but it doesn't gel with my personal experience. Maybe it is true that the magnitude and sum of corruption in the entire system is less when power is distributed... but then again there seems to be less vetting and more obvious corruption at a local level. Maybe that is a bullsh!t rationalization or assumption on my part. Perhaps the difference is just that we can more easily wrap our minds around local corruption, and the scale/audacity/impact of national/internal corruption is so much that we don't really grasp it.
This puts an interesting twist on things for me... I can see the advantages of distributed systems as being more efficient than central control... but how to address these things in that context:
 pool risk across all people in the nation to minimize the per capita cost of healthcare while ensuring baseline coverage for all
set national educational standards so that states with a high percentage of flat-earthers don't undermine the standards and put the kids from there at a disadvantage to kids from other states and the rest of the world
set national investments in scientific, medical, energy research, awarding funds based on merit from applications across the country
This is striking some parallels to my work with distributed computer systems. It is not an "either/or" proposition of centralized or distributed. There is a way to make sure important parts of the system that are in the main line of the work are distributed, but you can still retain centralized policy control that instructs the distributed elements how to handle their functions.
But in terms of government, I suspect the distributed entities (cities/counties/states) won't follow the policy guidelines of the central entity (federal government) unless it controls the purse strings by collecting the funds directly from citizens and then distributing them to the smaller entities. This activity itself is a source of power that corrupts, and it requires an infrastructure of people to manage the definition of how much funds to collect and distribute, how to account for that, how to detect and respond when folks are cheating, and then all the people required for these core functions require an infrastructure of others who work in human resources, IT, and so on like a huge company... so there is your government bloat. You can't get away from it unless you make the government powerless except for military. And then you surrender uniform national standards to define baseline rights for children and people in general. And then what happens when states like Hawaii get too many people dependent on government support? Do they start kicking people out? Do they form their own army to fight with the states that don't want to receive the deadbeats?
I'm back to believing in big government, with a panel to review government efficiency and continually analyze whether tasks can be done more cost effectively without lowering quality, e.g. by outsourcing the functions to private sector contractors, or by eliminating the task as a function of the government. This sounds pretty close to what we have today- yet another group of folks that some would call more "bloat".
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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May 11, 2017 - 05:31pm PT
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DMT your good people....
and so is Dr. F I know him from back in the day.
There is something about the internet that brings out bad manners in people, I know I have just exploded after reading some stuff. And the general lack of reading and writting skilz in some of us only adds to the problem.
I go climbing with Frummy all the time and we do 10-12 drives together...he is is a very left wing sort of person, his people settled in Petaluma way back and raised chickens.... I know you know the history of that place.
Anyway- face to face we have some heated discussions but remain calm and collected, he has his points and so do I. I don't think it would be possible to have the sort of talks we have while driving, hiking and climbing on the internet.
I hope I have not offended anybody with my point of view.
And to NUT.... what do you think about Janet Napolitano? She sure helps herself to the public treasury.
I think we were able to have almost free University education in California in the 60's and 70's is because the people who worked the university did so for just a average salary. A few years ago when UCSD needed a new chancellor because the old one retired I recall reading a story that the university went and hired a new one at almost twice the salary of the old one.... some spokesperson answered when asked why did they pay more.. "because we needed to to attract qualified people.." The way I see things in this world.... you go and promote some assistant chancellor and you offer the new person about 80% of what the old one made. That is how we do it in business. They do things differently in the government I guess.
going bouldering now
EDIT for nut.... the way our government was set up originally was limited power... the boundary set up by the founders works, but not if things get out of wack. ie: to much power in a president or a weak Senate things go to hell ..... and that's about where we are now.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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May 11, 2017 - 08:12pm PT
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Wa Post
Trump targets the Navy’s new aircraft catapult
President Trump set his sights on the Navy in a new interview, calling the service’s new electromagnetic catapult to launch planes off aircraft carriers “no good” and saying that the Navy needs to go back to “Goddamned steam,” the method used for decades. A Pentagon official said that Trump’s comments caught defense officials off-guard and are inaccurate.
Trump will "make the navy great" again!
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