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Open thread 4/17/23

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  • John A. Fleming April 17, 2023, 12:29 PM

    Hey Casey. REI is closing its Portland Store, it’s no longer safe (and probably too much inventory loss). Taking bets on how long before they close their Seattle Store?

    • ghostsniper April 17, 2023, 1:39 PM

      Close em all, online presence only.
      Maybe then they can drop their prices a little.
      I have the 20 year old version of their Pocket Rocket butane stove (which you can’t get any more) and the MSR 700ml kettle and use them all the time. In fact, just today I used them to heat up a can of Dinty Moore for lunch right here on my desk. Bring back the PR and sell it for a reasonable price and I’ll buy 4 more instantly. Fire everybody, close them dam stores!

    • Anonymous April 17, 2023, 4:00 PM

      I thought REI was among the wokest of the woke stores – maybe even led the way. Are they starting to feed on their own now? Bon appétit.

    • Casey Klahn April 18, 2023, 11:50 AM

      I worked for REI about 15 years and did achieve some rank, in spite of myself. Bellevue, Seattle (2 Seattle iterations) and Spokane. During the 90s, In Seattle, I gave back as good as I got when someone said something too extreme from the Left. One moronic hippie came running up the stairs in the old Capitol Hill store (now CHAZ), and was yelling that they’re taking the very last old growth trees in the Olympic National Park!! I told him calmly that there is no logging in the natl park, and maybe he meant another logging plot. He was asking me to sell him ascenders for his sit-in. I told him he was dumb as shit and get out of my sight. That is a true story. I was, for sure, the sole conservative who was outspoken, and yet in those days you could be. Now, forget dialogue. Especially in PortWeird.

      They’re also closing down the WalMarts in Portland, which will significantly impact the poor in the inner city because their opportunities for shoplifting will greatly decrease.

      Brothers and sisters, I could tell stories. The time we opened the doors on a rare sunny summer’s day on Cap. Hill, and a hobo guy stood in the door, glowering at the upscale patrons of RIE. He started yelling: :you people don’t know camping! I camp out every day!!” That year a bum died under the sunken pit loading dock. I recall the bad homeless problem in Seattle in the 90s. Someone had ‘lifted a tent and pitched it under the viaduct, and I noticed that it was the absolute best, most expensive, American made tent money could buy. The Rolls Royce space ship of mountain tents…housing some enterprising denizen of the waterfront in the Emerald City.

      Those were the fun and games days. But, since “The Summer of Love,” things have gone fully South in the cities. If shit gets any worse, you may find me in the remote interior of The Olympic Mountains, retreated away in my Moss tent, Dana Designs backpack, and Swiss mountain boots. A country boy can survive, my ass. This SOB is stocked and locked.

      Fuck Portland.

  • borderbill April 17, 2023, 4:41 PM

    ——been a member since 1966—bought goods from them. Caught them puttin’ up an xmas tree in a store before T’giving. They had good gear–now they’re peddling ethnicity and woke shit. Started goin’ south when they did the yuppie angle (remember that period?). They started out selling ice axes in the early ’60’s—-the saga continues—–

    • Casey Klahn April 18, 2023, 3:37 PM

      Started selling ice axes in the 20s. A group of Seattle climbers needed to import gear and confederated to make it affordable.

      • Casey Klahn April 18, 2023, 3:39 PM

        too tired after working today – John is correct it was the 30s

  • Joe April 17, 2023, 4:57 PM

    It all started when preachers started telling everyone descended from Adam. Anyone with half a brain and can read should be able to read the word and figure out that there were two creations.

  • John A. Fleming April 17, 2023, 9:35 PM

    REI started out in 1938 selling mountaineering gear to climbers, a most hardy lot of outdoorsmen. From those humble beginnings, they grew with the baby boomers. Better gear and better/cheaper cars made the mountains, cliffs, and rivers accessible to more people.

    We’ll see. From their location, it’s hard to do a grab and dash, unless it’s a coordinated flash mob. Which it will be. That parking structure thingy is a bottleneck, but I reckon the booster organizers will figure that out. Once the decline starts, it accelerates. Like all proggros in the big cities, they are in the grips of a religious fervor/fever, and will recover slowly, individually, or not at all. Portland is leading the way. Seattle is determined to do Portland one better.

    I was a REI member for 40 years. Told them to cancel my membership a few years ago, after they decided they won’t have any products that have any taint of firearms, e.g. Vista Outdoor. I have plenty of other choices. I don’t need smarmy NW proggros in any part of my life. Let them have what they want good and hard.

    I believe that one of the major factors of the decline of American cities, the “blue hives”, is the early 1960’s SupCt decision Reynolds v. Sims and its precursors, which changed the American constitutional republic to become closer to a mobocracy, a kakistocracy, and an anarcho-tyranny. No doubt the Nine Black Robes in their Empyrean wisdom thought they were perfecting the American Experiment, correcting the mistakes of the past and bringing the American Constitution more in line what what it should haver always been, but alas they were just mortal men doomed to die corrupted by power.

    These decisions concentrated all political power in the big cities, which made it easier for the -paths (socio/psycho) to climb aboard, by promising the gibs to the government-dependent city dwellers. And the psychos know that to stay in power, they need to maximize the teeming hordes of dependents. Hence our current explosion of tent dwellers and illegals and emptying the prisons. Those are not bad things, they are the health and wealth of the political class, and they will not now give them up without a fight to the death.

    It is often said as a bromide that republics are unstable, at least history says so. It is a fine balancing act, keeping political power from being unduly concentrated, while still having an effective government that does the dirty jobs we give it, and keeping the -paths consigned to the shadows where they in their misery and uselessness gnaw at themselves. I think we are learning from the history of the American Republic, that “more democracy” as an end in itself is not the answer to a stable and well-run republic.

    Hence, have you noticed, the proggros and their constant repetition of their religious shibboleth, “our Democracy” and “J6 the worst attack on our Democracy”? It’s so obvious now. It’s the source of their power, they’re not in it to “do good”, they are there to be in charge and do good for themselves on the side. They feel they must be in charge, because in a free society there is no role for parasites.

  • John A. Fleming April 17, 2023, 10:07 PM

    And if you think it’s getting bad in the proggro hives now, just you wait. The playbook has been tested and is ready. When they get close to the real FedGov debt limit and the recession finally hits and Fed/State tax receipts contract, the EBT system will start experiencing “temporary and isolated” disruptions, across the country. TPTB know how to scare the bejesus out of the Republicans. They did this last time “temporary and isolated”, they will go big this time. It’s all about power now, getting it and keeping it, and deal with the consequences later. This is Ayn Rand’s world now, we’re just living in it.

  • Anonymous April 17, 2023, 11:26 PM

    I don’t know why I post this here
    Maybe the heading picture
    It’s off topic
    These words this night woke me from a deep sleep
    I had to get the words down
    And I had to share … someplace

    My “site” didn’t feel right
    I stay “anonymous” there and here
    I don’t know why
    Those to stay anonymous from surely know me
    My site is full of dislike and government and all that
    A place for me to rant to myself in public
    A place to spew off negativity and despair
    It didn’t seem the proper place
    Perhaps neither is this
    But people here might understand
    We seem mostly of an age
    I feel “at home” here
    I’d have sent this to Gerard
    (I knew another Gerard once)
    So here it is
    Reality
    *****************************
    Jim

    Jim was a friend
    Not that kind of friend, not a friend to hang together
    But a friend
    One to cross a street for to say hi
    Like Patty, and John, and Dave, and Pam
    That kind of friend.

    We’d shoot a game of pool
    toss back a beer or two
    That kind of friend
    Jim went away for a while

    I was in DC
    I visited a wall
    Jim’s name wasn’t there
    Jim came home
    Except the part that didn’t
    The part one couldn’t see
    That wasn’t worthy of a wall

    for that wall would be much larger than The Wall
    Jim was a friend
    Jim never talked
    We’d shoot a game of pool
    toss back a beer or two
    But Jim wasn’t there

    I wonder what brought me
    to just now think of Jim
    That was so, so long ago
    I wonder what became of Jim

  • jwm April 18, 2023, 5:58 AM

    Very good, anon. Remember Linus throwing rocks into an empty field? It’s like that, only the field records the rocks, and builds up a dossier on you.
    Welcome to the future. Where’s my bubble-top flying car?

    JWM

  • Joe Krill April 18, 2023, 2:24 PM

    I remember Gerard posting some of Leonard Cohen’s music. Any chance for a repost?

  • ghostsniper April 18, 2023, 5:50 PM

    Essential Craftsman
    ==============
    This is something Gerard might have posted.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA-iF3sWMWY

    Gwan out there in the garage and make ya one!

    • jwm April 18, 2023, 7:47 PM

      Check the Navajo rug hanging from the rail about 33 seconds in. I have one with very much the same pattern. My grandparents bought it on the reservation in either Arizona, or New Mexico while they were on a road trip from Detroit to San Diego in 1923.

      JWM

      • Mike Seyle April 19, 2023, 5:57 AM

        I have an Indian rug too, from my grandparents. But it has swastikas. One of the swastikas is backward. (My grandmother said it was to not offend the gods by making an otherwise perfect rug.) And it has a thread from the center to the edge to let the rug’s spirit out. Again, per my grandmother. Don’t know if she was right; maybe the weaver was dyslexic and careless.

        • ghostsniper April 19, 2023, 8:41 AM

          Thing is that center thread needs to terminate on the edge in a direction in perfect alignment with a means of egressing the building, ie., window, door, etc. Otherwise the escaping spirit is trapped inside the dwelling causing it’s ire to grow exponentially daily. Me? I’d snip that wayward thread off at the source and tell that spirit to go pound sand….but that’s just me.