BootmanLA

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.

You are making a common mistake. DoxyPEP - notice that there is no "R" there - is for Post Exposure Prophylaxis - treatment AFTER possible exposure. When used with "Doxy", it's referring not to HIV, but to other, bacteriological STI's like syphilis. The point of DoxyPEP is to prevent an exposure to one of those STIs in a sexual encounter from infecting you. When this is used for HIV exposure - for someone who just had unprotected sex and didn't intend to, or had a needle stick from an unknown source, or whatever, PEP is used to prevent HIV from taking hold AFTER the exposure. It consists of a double-dose of the same medication used in PREP, then a 30-day regimen to (hopefully) conclusively prevent HIV from taking hold in the body. PrEP - THERE'S that "r" - is for PRE-exposure prophylaxis. It's not normally used for antibiotics, etc. because we don't want to develop antibiotic-resistant strains of bugs that we normally can treat pretty readily. So there is NO SUCH THING as "DoxyPrEP". But because of the potential consequences of HIV infection, we DO use PrEP for HIV prevention.

That's certainly the approach of some members of our community, to their undying shame. But there are quite a few of us in the "LGB" part of the "LGBT" spectrum who want ALL of us protected. Because we know that these assholes target the least-supported members of the group, knowing that the rest won't be unified in protecting them. Then they move on to shear off the next group - say, HIV+ people, or whatever. Divide and conquer is an age-old strategy, and sadly, it works too often.

Vought is also a leading proponent of the absurd notion that if the executive branch decides it doesn't want to spend money that was appropriated by Congress, it can just.... not. And a thousand other bad ideas, many of which were in the Project 2025 book. You know, the one Trump swore he'd never heard of, and wasn't a blueprint for his administration, and no one associated with it would have any sort of power in his administration.

I think I've covered this before, but here's a kind of "dumbed down" version of how IP addresses work with internet providers. Each provider has licensed a batch of IP addresses that it can use to route content to its subscribers' devices. In layman's terms, that means "YourFavoriteISP" controls a bunch of IP addresses. When they license those addresses, they're registered with the giant servers that route the internet, so that if a website gets a request from a device at address 1.2.3.4, it can determine that said address is controlled by YourFavoriteISP, and that ISP's routing manager (called the "DHCP server") is located at, say, 1.2.3.240 - and that server is located in Bumfuck, Colorado. So let's say 1.2.3.4 (your phone) requests content from a website. The website says, OK, I need to send this page back to 1.2.3.4, but I don't know exactly where that device even is. But I know it's managed by YourFavoriteISP, at 1.2.3.240, in Colorado, so - hey, 1.2.3.240, send this to your homeboy that's at 1.2.3.4. Then the DHCP server at 1.2.3.240 gets the page, asks itself - who did I give 1.2.3.4 to, the last time I gave that out? - gets the answer, and sends the page on. This all happens in fractions of a second. The problem is when YourFavoriteISP also has routing servers in Shithole, Idaho and Dickwad, Montana. Most of the time, the Idaho server uses its own, separate pool of IP addresses from the Colorado one or the Montana one. But demand isn't static, and it's possible that Colorado's IP pool may get maxed out occasionally during tourist seasons. So YourFavoriteISP links the DHCP servers at all three locations so that, if any one of them is over capacity - it doesn't have any more addresses to give out - it can get an address from the others. So Colorado users may get an IP address that the internet authorities "think" is located in Idaho. Or Montana. And normally that wouldn't matter, but because state laws are now making it a criminal offense to offer certain content to their residents without verifying the age of the user, places like this have to figure out where the user is coming from - BEFORE any content is actually displayed to the user. The only feasible way, at this point, is to use the database that says THIS address is registered to an ISP at a server in X location. And if X location is one that the website needs to block, it's going to block, even though it's possible the user is not in that location at all. After all, that's what a VPN does: it tells all the internet sites you try to reach that you are, in fact, in whatever location you've specified - even though my device may be in Louisiana and it's using an IP address in Louisiana, the VPN service re-routes all my traffic to appear to be coming from Denver, Colorado, because the IP address belonging to the VPN is registered there. These problems people are reporting are kind of almost a "reverse VPN" - the location associated with the IP address is one you didn't select, and doesn't reflect reality, but it's not one you can control. It's flagging you as being in a state that this site has barred. The good news is that you can still use a VPN to mask your "apparent" location and specifically choose one that is not on the blocked list. In other words, the VPN doesn't care where you got your IP address from; it's going to take care of getting you the content you want, and what IP address you have underlying it doesn't matter at all.

Mostly because of deceptive marketing, not because their underlying products were defective.

Without pointing to the member to whom my quoted post was a reply, I will only note that no, it was not a personal shot at you. That member had given examples of using "woke" in sentences that disparaged those who might conventionally be called "woke", and I was simply pointing out that using it as an epithet the way he did was stupid.

@1hornyjohn is absolutely correct. Most importantly, you cannot just walk into a pharmacy (US), chemist (UK), or whatever the equivalent is in other places and say you'd like to order a month's supply of <whatever>. An HIV specialist needs to run substantial lab work on you, to determine what your viral load is, what your T-cell count is, how well your kidneys, liver, and other organs are functioning, whether or not you have pre-diabetes or diabetes, your heart and lung function, and so forth. With that data they can narrow down to the best choice of medication for you. For instance, if you already have impaired kidney function (you wouldn't realize it, necessarily, but the lab tests would show it), then the doctor would want to avoid certain treatments that are harsher on the kidneys.

Another example: "People who use 'woke' as an epithet are morons"

To clarify (I hope): What I believe @PozBearWI is saying is that when the very first treatments for AIDS came out (like AZT), an AIDS diagnosis was, in fact, pretty much a death sentence that was (all things considered) rapidly approaching. And thus, as he's noting, people with AIDS (and even some who were just positive, but not yet at that stage) jumped at the chance to try AZT and the other early experimental drugs, because at that time the choice was "experiment or likely die". As I understand @Poz50something, some gay men being reluctant to get an untested COVID vaccine are hypocritical because they'd have been among those lining up for AZT back in the late 1980's. But @PozBearWI has a point in that most people who rejected the COVID vaccine weren't facing certain death if they didn't try SOMETHING, the way men with AIDS were. I disagree with those who reject(ed) the COVID vacccine on that basis, but the AZT and COVID vaccine comparison is only slightly useful, if at all.

JFC: From the day the vaccines were announced, they were touted as a TWO shot regimen - it didn't "go" to a second vaccine. Were you just living under a rock for the entire pandemic unable to read, watch, or hear the news? Or did you just not understand the words they were using? I can't think of any other way to explain not understanding, FROM THE BEGINNING, that there would be a two-shot sequence. And like MOST vaccines given to adults, particularly for mutable viral agents (like flu), there's almost always a booster or annual shot. It's true we did not know, in December 2020 (which is when the vaccines were released - UNDER PRESIDENT FUCKHEAD TRUMP, mind you, so you can't blame Biden if you weren't told from day one) whether boosters would specifically be needed. But again, anyone who isn't suffering from cranio-rectal inversion would have heard, very early on, that the virus was, in fact, mutating and would probably require boosters to maintain efficacy against it.

More than one person died. Yes, one insurrectionist who refused repeated orders from the Capitol Police to not enter the building "fucked around and found out", as they say. I feel bad for her family's loss but not bad for her being so dumb as to disobey a police order with guns pointed at her head. And actually three other protesters died, one trampled to death by her fellow protesters, the other two by a stroke and a heart attack brought on by the melee. Five police officers died: one of complications of injuries received in the attack; the other four by suicide shortly afterward, with the circumstances of the riot almost certain a primary factor. I realize that some asswipes here don't consider police suicides to be actual problems, but here we are. As for accepting a presidential pardon, especially a pre-emptive one: It means, for someone like, say, Fauci or Cheney that they don't have to hire several high-powered lawyers that bill $1,500/hour to fight all the fucking bullshit that Trump promised to unleash on them. If you were looking at legal bills that could bankrupt your family and you were offered a pardon that meant those bills would never happen, you'd take it too, guaranteed. You said "When you accept a Pre emptive Presidential Pardon, you are admitting guilt even before charges have been laid against." That's untrue. I'm not going to say it's a lie because a lie is a deliberate falsehood, and I don't know whether you're deliberately saying something know is false, or you're just gullible enough to believe that this widely circulated piece of shit is actually good law. It's not. Accepting a pardon is NOT an admission of guilt. The fact that Trump is stupid enough to believe it doesn't make it true. But let's assume that's true: That means ALL those people who Trump pardoned in 2021 on his way out the door, including Mike Flynn, Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D'Souza, Bernard Kerik, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Stephen Bannon, and - oh, let's not forget - Charles Kushner, who hired a hooker to seduce his brother, and filmed it, then threatened to release the film to his brother's wife, to keep the brother from testifying against him in his massive fraud trial (where he was in fact found guilty). So, by your logic, all these people are admitting their guilt. Right?

That's a pretty silly take. When an incoming administration has publicly stated he wants not only prosecution (for people DOING THEIR FUCKING JOBS), but unspecified "consequences" (which his horde of violent supporters will correctly interpret as "take them out"), a pardon is about the only thing that makes sense. At least take the prosecution off the table. And yes, it is a vaccine. I'll take the words of the tens of thousands of medical professionals and researchers as to what it is over ... checking notes... some insatiable hole in Toronto. First, that last part is just not true. It's a gross misreading of the law promoted by simpletons and believed by the gullible. If you're equating the actions of insurrectionist rioters beating cops with flagpoles, driving stun guns into their necks and smashing their shields into their skulls, such that some of them died from their injuries (let's call them the J6 mob) with the actions of the US representatives, including two Republicans, who conducted investigations into what happened and to what extent the Trump administration was responsible for instigating those actions (let's call them the J6 Committee), then you don't understand what equivalences are. And as noted above, these people were DOING THEIR JOBS - serving on a legitimately constituted House Select Committee - and deserved none of the opprobrium and threats of prosecution from a vindictive, thin-skinned, petty, tyrannical tinpot emperor wannabe like Trump that they got. A pardon - to keep them out of the reach of a vendetta by Trump's DOJ - is again the LEAST any reasonable president could do.

For those who are interested, his cousin Caroline Kennedy (who was US Ambassador to Japan under President Obama and to Australia under President Biden, and who is the only surviving child of President John F. Kennedy) wrote a letter to the members of the US Senate regarding her cousin's nomination to be DHHS secretary. Among a few choice bits: She is not surprised that he keeps birds of prey as pets, because he, like his birds, is a predator; he used to drop mice and baby chickens into a blender when they were teens to feed his birds; Growing up, his basement room was "the" place where all of his siblings and cousins could score drugs (several of whom died of overdoses); He's gotten rich off his crusade against vaccination, and he intends to continue being a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a vaccine (ie if he wins, he makes money) even if he's confirmed as DHHS Secretary; Even though he's a crusader against vaccines, all his own kids were vaccinated. Several Republican senators seem uneasy about voting to confirm him, and not just on what passes for the moderate wing of the party. Hard-right members are being pushed by outside forces claiming Jr. is still essentially a Democrat and will betray Trump. Infighting is wonderful.

He actually issued the executive order implementing this on Monday afternoon. See here: [think before following links] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ The order also revokes all efforts to apply Bostock (the gay/trans employment discrimination decision from SCOTUS from 2020) to any other circumstances, such as housing discrimination or educational discrimination. Not just the trans part, but the ENTIRE decision. What that means is that if a plaintiff sues, say, a landlord for discrimination against gay people, the federal government will now OPPOSE (via amicus briefs or even outright intervention) extending Bostock's reasoning that discrimination on the basis of sex includes gay and trans people - an opinion by Neil Gorsuch, at that, one that Chief Justice Roberts joined - should not apply to any other circumstances. Dollars to donuts that if an employment case goes against an employer - as it must, under Bostock - the federal government will be urging SCOTUS to overturn that precedent as misguided. And right in the crosshairs after that is same-sex marriage, then laws against sodomy. Everyone said "You're being hysterical!" when I said this was coming. Well, it's already well on the way. And all the gay Trumpanzees who voted for him because whatever reason are about to enter the "finding out" phase. "But I never dreamed the leopards would eat MY face," sobbed the gay man who voted for the Leopard Eating Faces Party.

For once in my life my view is close to the consensus (I voted 5). Like others have said, three is a threeway. Four is closer, but in my limited experience, it tends to devolve into two two-ways, even if the partners swap out periodically. Five means that if everyone is playing, there's always something going on besides regular pairings of two - either one guy is getting it at both ends, or one guy is getting sucked and fucked at the same time, or he's getting DP'ed, or... well, almost any combination of things. It's true that any even number of x players can devolve into x/2 pairings, but I think the more players, the less likely that is to happen. And as others have noted, there's got to be a mix (and at least two bottoms). If there's one bottom, it's a gang bang, and that's not an orgy.

In theory. Assuming the online pharmacy is a reputable one, that is. But Doxycycline should be cheap to get filled at any pharmacy in the US - it's a very old, long-established antibiotic that's been in commercial production since 1967 (so, generics have been available for 50+ years). If you have no access to a local physician who will prescribe it for you, I suppose an online "prescription/pharmacy" service, like the ones that prescribe and sell ED meds, is better than nothing. But realistically anyone who's sexually active really ought to have a physician who monitors them for infections of this sort, even if it's a local STD clinic.

You're not one of the few - you're one of the many. Probably nowhere near a majority, but a significant number of those who opposed Trump's re-election are very, very concerned about what an administration like his might do unfettered by any thoughts of being prosecuted after his term of office is up.

Oh, I'm sure there are many reasons porn might be shot in south Florida - good weather for outdoor work most of the year, for one thing. As for the specific payment methods, you're probably right about privately produced, one-on-one porn. But I think the original discussion was more about quasi-studio porn, where record keeping (as you've eloquently discussed before) is legally required and where I'm sure the "producer" in question is going to have financial records for payments to performers regardless of their preferences.