BootmanLA

Especially malign foreign actors. Trump didn't give a fuck if the money was looted from Russian and other former Soviet industries seized by the government and bestowed on Putin's kleptocratic partners; that money was a lifeline in his never-ending cash-draining "business" [sic] dealings. He laundered money by the tens of millions for the Russian version of the mob, and you can be assured they kept very good records of it.

As others far more articulate than me have stated, a one-day boycott doesn't affect the bottom lines of big companies like Amazon or Walmart or whomever. Particularly since many of those people will go buy on Saturday the things they didn't buy on Friday, from the same place they were boycotting on Friday. Where the one-day boycotts ARE effective, however, is as a warning shot. Let's say Walmart's sales, on a boycott Friday, drop by $300 million. On any given day their sales are somewhere north of $1.5 billion, so that loss isn't disastrous, especially if Saturday and Sunday are larger as people "catch up". But it lets Walmart know how much it could expect to lose from a sustained boycott, if one were to actually come about. Compare with Target, where consumers are doing an extended boycott over its cancelation of its DEI policies (and, to a lesser extent, over its getting rid of LGBT themed merchandise during Pride last year). The ongoing boycott there *IS* hurting Target - sales are down across the board significantly. It's arguable, of course, that Walmart and Amazon, as giants and being aimed at a lower-price demographic than Target, are better insulated from the effects: everyday shoppers won't be able to afford to boycott them the way a typical Target shopper can shift to, say, Trader Joes or Whole Foods. But there's no guarantees.

Washington gave that advice at a time when the Atlantic Ocean isolated the United States from all of Europe, when an invading army would require weeks in ships to get to us (although Britain did come through Canada once). With the advent of ships powered other than by wind or oars, with the invention of airplanes and aircraft carriers and missiles and the like, we are no longer physically isolated from adversaries, We operated for almost a century and a half on the premise that we didn't really need "alliances" because we had only two borders to defend and we were far stronger, economically and militarily, than either. We still got dragged into WWI because one side in that war insisted on attacking our non-military shipping. Then we found out, in 1941, that our vaunted physical isolation didn't really protect us nearly as much as we thought given the destruction wrought at Pearl Harbor. And even once we established military supremacy over pretty much every other fighting force on earth, 9/11 showed us that it was still possible for enemies to inflict massive damage on us. This isn't to say a lot of our "adventuring" wasn't a big factor in these things happening. We made a lot of enemies throwing our weight around. But the answer isn't "retreat from all alliances" but "stop trying to meddle so much in other countries' basic affairs".

The first part of that is incorrect. The 2% of GDP is not for "member contributions". It's what each member of NATO is asked (with no enforcement mechanism) to spend on defense. That means if a country has a GDP of 100 billion, it's expected to spend 2 billion of that on "defense" - which includes all of its military spending. It's not a contribution made to some account at NATO. The US looks "good" under this standard only because we spend such a large portion of our GDP on our military, most of which goes to military contractors supplying weapons and material, a substantial portion of which we can't seem to even track. "Member contributions" are a separate assessment actually DOES pay into an account at NATO, because something has to pay for its overhead. But that is nowhere near 2% of any nation's GDP.

With respect, what happened at Tavistock in the UK has zero bearing on whether those surgeries are occurring in the United States, which (given that this topic is about Trump and health care) is the parameter at hand. Just because, say, certain African countries permit female genital mutilation doesn't mean that FGM is even occurring in the US, much less on a widespread basis. (I'm well aware it may be happening under the radar in some immigrant communities, but that's a far cry from the outrage over "they're letting this thing happen all over!" that we're seeing about trans surgery for minors. I'll also note that even if I agreed with your categorical statement about "no irreversible change", puberty blockers - which accounts for about 99% of the pre-age-of-majority "intervention" in this country - is not in fact "irreversible". Simply stopping taking them allows puberty to progress.

Because there is a significant chunk of the population who is perfectly willing to suffer as long as they think other, less-deserving people are going to suffer more.

But there's an enormous gap between "this school lets students use their preferred pronouns without notifying the parents" and "10-12 year olds getting bottom surgery" (or whatever). And no one I know - not the most liberal of liberals, and I know some pretty far left people - are in favor of gender-confirming surgery on anyone who isn't - at a minimum - close to the age of majority; and none of them support such surgeries without parental consent. Honestly, no one with any sense gives a fuck whether "Taylor" wants to be referred to as "he" or "she" in school. Pronouns are a sideshow - and dishonest people want to use the use of "pronoun identification" (My pronouns are he/him) as evidence that there's a huge movement read to cut little boys' dicks and balls off to turn them into girls, or to do breast removal on girls.

Rashes are not a tell-tale sign of infection (of HIV, at least; you could have been infected with any number of other things, either STI's or just plain old things like measles. Or you could just have a skin reaction to something. If you're so concerned about whether you're infected, log off, go get tested, and if you get a negative test, go back for another in 2 weeks. This forum is not going to be able to diagnose you.

Frankly, that's bullshit. There is no case in this country - NONE - of a child 10-12 years old getting full surgical intervention without parental consent. It's just not happening. It's damned near impossible for a doctor to prescribe ANY medication for a child without parental consent, much less something like puberty blockers. That's just right-wing bullshit lies that are being repeated over and over through the internet to convince gullible fools that the chirren are in DANGER! and we need to ACT! to protect them from BIG BAD TRANSGAY! who's trying to undermine all parental authority, etc. I honestly thought most people on here could see through that crap.

Which is fine for a private conversation; ones carried out in public on public forums perhaps should be explained a bit more, for the benefit of the rest of us. That said, I think there's kind of a navel-gazing effect; when you hang around a bunch of drug users whenever you have "play like us", naturally you're going to think that "play like us" means drug users. People whose only experience with "eating out" is McDonald's are unlikely to be able to envision that there's an entire mass of people whose tastes are, shall we say, substantially different.

Define "play like us".

That's about as succinct and accurate an evaluation as any of us can make. Either you care enough to ensure you don't infect anyone else (including your partner), assuming you are infected; or you don't. If you do, get tested, and re-tested even if it's negative for a month or two (because it can take a while for infection to be detectable by ordinary testing. If you ARE positive, the first few months can be the time when you're most at risk for infecting someone else, because the virus is replicating through your system and your body hasn't figured out any way to fight it yet. So keep that in mind for any sexual encounters you might have until you get conclusive results.

The difference is that no prosecutors have felt any of the Bidens, except for one prosecutor going after his son, found any credible evidence that any of them had committed a crime. But the Russian stooge currently in office, while running for president, made it clear he intended to order his Justice Department to investigate and charge "the Biden Crime Family" (as he called it) in retaliation for the very legitimate felony charges Hair Furor was facing until he skated by getting re-elected. In such a case, pardoning people to block retaliatory prosecution (which can easily bankrupt someone) isn't an unthinkable concept. Separately, I'll note that Trump pardoned (or in a few cases, commuted sentences for) everyone who was involved in 1/6, whether charged or not, having stood trial or not, convicted or not. So clearly he's not foreign to the concept. He also pardoned a serviceman who was accused of murdering a Afghani civilian (and who had confessed to the killing), but who had not yet stood trial. And notably, he pardoned Steve Bannon, who was facing a federal fraud trial, before conviction as well - someone who'd been intimately involved with Trump's campaign, which is arguably as bad or worse than pardoning a family member. So let's not pretend that Biden's pardons were somehow grotesque compared with the asshole currently squatting in the White House.

I'm going to point out a few things here that may or may not have sunk in for all. "Puberty Blockers" are temporary in their effects; people who stop taking them, say, in their late teens almost always promptly enter puberty, just delayed in starting. While the conditions are completely different, conceptually it's like taking any other medication to manage a physical condition, like insulin for diabetes; you stop taking the medication, the condition returns. So puberty blockers delay the onset of physical changes that may be much harder to reverse if those changes happen during the typical "puberty" period. And they allow the person time to consider whether they are truly transgender, and whether they want to continue gender-affirming care, as adults. It's true that there are significant brain changes *during the typical puberty period*. We don't fully know, however, how much of those changes occur *because of puberty* and how much occur *at a time when puberty is typically happening*. Undoubtedly it's a mix of the two, but puberty blockers do not mean that the brain will remain forever in a pre-pubescent state. In fact, we know that many changes in the male brain happen long after puberty has essentially completed, so brain development is far from being a puberty-dependent change.

Good luck with that. Since Miriam Adelson has Trump's nuts locked in a box in her Vegas mansion, Israel will continue to get everything it wants from the current administration, even if Daddy Elon tells him not to.

And yet unemployment is skyrocketing already under Trump, including tens of thousands of federal workers. So much for jobs.

There's an old saying that Trump is a poor man's idea of a rich man - that is, lots of shit covered in gold plating and ostentatious as all fuck but with almost nothing to back it up. For most of his adult life he was borderline bankrupt, if not actually so, and only with a few major cash infusions later in life (his inheritance/bailouts from his father, the Apprentice paychecks, the incessant grift his campaigns have funneled into his pockets) was he able to avoid losing everything. The same sort of thing is true, I think, for considering Trump "dominant". A bunch of fucking yahoo idiots in Shithole, TX and Bumfuck, AL and Moronville, Idaho saw him pretend to be authoritative and decisive on "The Apprentice" (while he was actually following a script in rented office space designed to make him look powerful), and decided that he actually WAS that kind of person - instead of the "fold like a paper napkin" guy he is when confronted with actual dominance. He's a dumbass working-class nobody's idea of a dom.

By deleting items you no longer need.

That's the question, though. Red states are pushing an interpretation of law that would render the providers liable anyway. For decades, for example, the law about collecting sales tax on interstate purchases was that companies in other places couldn't be forced to act as the sales tax collector for the delivery state, the way an in-state vendor would be. The underlying principle was that the seller had to have a "nexus" with the state where the recipient lived. That could be a branch office or warehouse, for example. It might be attending trade shows in that state as an exhibitor/vendor. It might even be having a sales manager who lived in that state. But the key - for as long as anyone could remember - was that the nexus had to be physical. There had to be some physical connection between the company and the land of the state trying to make the company collect the tax. Until it wasn't any more. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld the idea of an "economic nexus" - that as long as the vendor made a certain amount of sales into a state, that state could require the vendor to collect sales tax. So what does that concept - not the specific decision - mean for cases like this? It's quite possible the Supreme Court will say, in effect, if you have a certain level of interaction with the citizens of a particular state, you can be required to adhere to their rules regarding content access. In other words, this is a legal action based on the Commerce Clause in the constitution. That's a separate issue from the notion that states can impose governmental barriers to viewing the content in the first place - ie legal action based on the First Amendment. Right now, the primary argument against such laws is that you can't impose the requirement without simultaneously requiring the user to identify himself - and at least under current law, you can't do that, at least not in a way that lends itself to the government having/retaining that information. So, for instance, if you were to buy a porn magazine at a newsstand, the store could require you to show ID to prove you're over 18. But they couldn't copy your license, they couldn't record it in a registry of porn buyers, and they certainly couldn't turn your name over to the government as a porn buyer. The argument now is that there's no way to secure the ID information provided, either to the content provider or to a hypothetical third-party age verification service, remains confidential - that it's not placed into the digital equivalent of that registry of porn buyers. And that while keeping minors from accessing pornography may be a legitimate goal of government, it can't use a method that infringes on core First Amendment principles unless that goal or interest is "compelling" AND the way it's chosen to implement that is the least restrictive way of doing so.

I mean, I know I'm old. But still: When you ask someone today their impression of Beirut, the average person would say "bombed-out war zone full of rubble". When I was a youngster, "Beirut" meant the place American and European expatriates went to live like princes for a fraction of the cost back home. Granted, it was exploitative and certainly not entirely justifiable from an ethical standpoint. But the point is, it existed, and it wasn't sustainable in that region. And neither will Gaza be.

For what it's worth, @alex36210fr, I think in most of the "advanced" western countries with access to PrEP bareback sex is becoming the norm, while chemically "enhanced" [sic] sex is not. Sure, among the "look at me in my booty shorts and harness that i had to have someone teach me how to put on" meth head circuit party crowd, chem sex is probably pretty common. But if there are 5,000 gay methheads bouncing aimlessly with glassed-over eyes in some warehouse to interminable "music", bear in mind most of them are probably visitors from elsewhere and there's 10 or 20 times the number of locals there who are at home, living out a normal life, and not itching to score their next fix so they can try to have three guys' hands fist them at once. Or whatever.

If there was any evidence whatsoever that the vaccine killed 2 million people, the vaccines would have been withdrawn long ago. Hell, if they'd killed 10,000 people, that would have been acknowledged. But they didn't.

For those who forget their history: the middle East used to have just such a place, just north of Israel, in fact - Lebanon. Formerly a French mandate (the way Palestine - that is, Israel/Gaza - was a British mandate), Lebanon was independent not long after France fell in WWII, in a more-or-less bloodless transfer under the Free French (ie DeGaulle). From the early 1940's until 1975, Lebanon was above all else a resort country, with Beirut at its center. While it supported the Arab attacks on Israel in the 1948 war, they did not play a major role, and by and large there wasn't much fighting (especially in middle East terms) between them. Lebanon had Shia and Sunni Muslim, Maronite Christian, and Greek Orthodox leadership working together in about as multicultural a government as one could have imagined in the 1940's. But as the PLO was driven out of neighboring states (particularly Jordan) and into Lebanon, inevitably conflict arose with the established residents, and civil war erupted in 1975 (with active interference from Syria and Israel), beginning decades of hot and cold war, shellings, bombings, assassinations, and more. The Syrian army finally withdrew in 2005 - 30 years later - but that hardly brought peace, as by this point Hezbollah was becoming entrenched in significant parts of Lebanon (thus bringing Iran into the fighting, albeit by proxy). Israel is still actively fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon (ie on its own border). And today Lebanon is such a failed state that something north of 80% of its population is impoverished. As for tourism, that portion of its economy is a fraction of what it was pre-1975. Most of that tourism is from neighboring Jordan, from Saudi Arabia, or (for some reason) Japan, though in many years most tourists seem to be Lebanese visiting places they used to live, not foreigners bringing in new spending. How exactly Donold thinks he's going to do better in Gaza is beyond me. It's true that Gaza is surrounded by Israel and Egypt, so it would be harder for terrorists to sneak in and incite war. But certainly not impossible.

Anything I post is free for the taking, as long as the site's rules permit it.

There's literally no way to know what the risk is. 1. The "top" could be lying about his viral load. He could even be lying about being poz. He could be lying about whether Atripla was tried. 2. PrEP is effective in the vast number of cases. If your friend is taking his medication consistently, then he likely has nothing to worry about. The idea of having found the magic poz top who will "slice right thru his PrEP" is kinda silly on its face. 3. You say your friend "loves idea of getting Pozzed" but he's on PrEP, which suggests he likes the idea of being negative even more. Based on his questions about "risk" it sounds like he's more of a thrill-seeker/risk-taker than someone who actually wants to be poz. Because if he did, he'd be off PrEP already. Look, your buddy is free to fantasize all he wants about risk and getting pozzed and thinking there's some magical change that will come over him when he finally does. Fantasies are one of the things that make life worth living. But let's at least acknowledge it for what it is.