BootmanLA

To be fair, it should fall on Putin AND on his circle of oligarchs. None of them came by their wealth honestly; they all had help from the government (particularly, Putin) in robbing the nation blind. And in return, they have helped keep him in power by cutting him in on the take, giving him the resources he needs for his propaganda. So while I don't want the punishment to affect ordinary Russians any more than is unavoidable, I'm fine with every one of the rich baddies in Putin's inner circle losing everything and then facing legal consequences.

I agree they need (and deserve) a lot of rebuilding assistance. But the oligarchs generally speaking got their money by stealing it from the Russian people, not the Ukranian people; right now, an awful lot of Russians feel for Ukraine and hate this war being levied against them, but if the ill-gotten gains of the oligarchs are showered on Ukraine and not the people from whom they were stolen, there's a serious potential for animosity. Remember that one of the many things that led to WWII was the crushing reparations load placed on the Triple Alliance, particularly Germany, after WWI. A lot of everyday Germans were heavily taxed to pay the reparations demanded by the west, in large measure to compensate France for how much of its farmland and other resources were destroyed. No need to provoke the same response.

I will agree with those who say that it's unlikely (though not impossible) for the masses to overthrow Putin. As long as the military and the oligarchs remain loyal to him, he's likely fairly safe. But. The west is going after the oligarchs, to the extent of not only freezing their assets (when they find them), but seizing them - as in, they're not getting them back. They're increasingly being blocked from leaving Russia (except for China, and godforsaken places like Syria and a few others), and when most of your money is frozen overseas and inflation starts running 20% per month, suddenly Putin doesn't look like such a smart investment for those who robbed their country blind when the USSR came apart at the seams. With even the Swiss going in on the sanctions, there's not going to be any safe place for Russians to spend their money outside Russia, where it's going to be worthless. And there are signs the military is not full-tilt behind Putin, either. They bought into (or pretended to buy into) Putin's plan that they could just steamroll into Ukraine, take over, and be welcomed as heroes of the liberation. The reality is turning out to be... quite different. The officially acknowledged (by Russia) death toll among its troops is already far in excess of what they predicted for the entire operation, which means the real number is undoubtedly substantially more than that. The troops are poorly trained (no reflection on them, it's their trainers who are at fault) and the Ukrainians have captured a goodly number of troops who surrendered rather readily. At some point, some generals are going to talk amongst themselves and question whether this dream of reassembling the Soviet empire is actually feasible. At that point, when enough oligarchs and generals decide that the situation is becoming untenable, Putin had best be very certain his inventory of Novichok is up to date and completely accurate, with none missing.

Every president prior to Lyndon Johnson created an artificially limited selection pool - white men. No women or Blacks (or Hispanics, or anyone else) were considered. Moreover, for more than a century, it was an unwritten rule that there could only be one Catholic justice on the Court at a time, and it was well understood by all presidents and the Senates to whom they submitted nominees for confirmation that second or other Catholics would be rejected. For almost a century and a half, there was effectively a "no Jews" rule, and once that "rule" was broken, the same deal applied as for Catholics: no more than one at a time, with the remainder all Protestant (white men). Anyone who thinks that the pool of black women who could serve on the Supreme Court is too thin for consideration, or who think there's some sort of magic "you must be this qualified to ride this ride" measuring stick, is a fool. George HW Bush didn't select Clarence Thomas because he was "the best candidate" for the job; he picked him because he was the only Black judge with any conservative credentials. Ronald Reagan specifically promised to appoint a woman to the Court, at a time when women lawyers represented 8% of the legal profession and an even smaller percentage of the nation's judges.

I notice it's almost always the guys with 10 or 20 (or fewer) posts on here who show up "en masse" periodically and sing the praises of being poz. Almost like someone is coordinating an effort to promote this. Interesting. In any event, all that "oh i'm liberated I don't have to worry any more" can be had with PrEP. So (to my thinking, at least), opting to contract a fatal-unless-treated-forever disease instead of taking a reasonable precautionary medication is, well, evidence of an undeveloped ability to make sensible decisions. Now, if someone is pursuing getting pozzed because he thinks there is some mystical bond between poz people, because some airhead on here told him there was, well, again, evidence of an undeveloped ability to make sensible decisions. None of those people who share your alleged "bond" are going to pay your health insurance premiums or deductibles, and none of them are going to help nurse you through your first opportunistic infection. But sure, go ahead and bask in that "bond" and "freedom".

I might be giving the dolt too much credit, but I think by "Constitutional Minarchist" he might be making a play on "Constitutional minimalist" - as in he thinks the government can only do the minimal things specifically outlined and we have to ignore all the general, broad provisions of power grants found therein.

Your information is faulty. That is not "for extra protection". That is PART (but only PART) of the routine you can follow as an alternative to daily use. This method is called "on demand" PrEP - the idea is to lessen the number of pills you have to take, IF you are not having sex more than once or twice in a week. When you use the "on demand" method, you take two pills anywhere from 2 to 24 hours before you have sex. Not "right before", because they don't have time to spread through your system before you come in contact with HIV. 2 hours seems to be the minimum time needed for the pills to spread through your body, but the effect begins to diminish pretty significantly after 24 hours, so you can't wait more than that for sex. Once you do have sex - in that 2 to 24 hour window after the first dose - you take a single pill 24 hours after the first dose, and ANOTHER pill 24 hours after that. In total, you take 4 pills over the period in question. By that point, the HIV will have been unable to get a foothold in your system and start replicating, and the virus is short-lived, so you're past the infection point. But note the timing - between the first dose and the last may only be a period of 2 days or slightly longer, during which you're taking four pills, or twice the usual daily dosage. If you have sex twice during a week and you use this method, you're already taking 8 pills, or one more than a "daily" dose would require. Having sex a third time - which is hardly unusual for many of us - means you'd be better off just taking one pill each day. Because while these meds are generally safe, they can have side effects. Some of those side effects may take months or years to present themselves, after a long period of use. So limiting intake to the minimum needed to protect yourself is key. So, to recap: if you have sex on average only once or twice a week, or if you regularly go a week or more without sex, the 2-1-1 dosing of "on demand" PrEP may be a workable, better choice for you. If you have sex at least twice a week and occasionally more often? Stick with daily dosing and just try to make it automatic.

All the people here urging you to keep taking it bare and taking loads (with no mention of PrEP) are giving reprehensible advice. It's fine if you want to BB. It's fine if you want to run the risk of HIV by going without PrEP. But absent a clear understanding with your girlfriend that she's okay with that risk too - one she understands because you've explained to her exactly what you do - it's no longer fine once she's in the picture. I assume - without knowing for certain - that she doesn't know you're bi, she doesn't know you bb, and she doesn't know you're a bottom taking loads. If I'm wrong on all of those, that's one thing. But if I'm right - on any of the three - the honorable choices are to tell her, to dump her, or to quit putting her at risk. The last is an option you almost certainly won't choose, so it's really between the first two.

Nice history, but you left out the parts where Trump's first campaign manager, who was in hock up past his eyeballs to Russian oligarchs and who had been a key player in the Russian-controlled Ukrainian government that the Ukrainian people themselves threw out of office, was desperate to do something to prevent a polonium creamer being dropped into his coffee. You left out the part where said campaign manager turned over valuable campaign polling data, showing where Clinton support might be peeled away with the right influence campaign, to a Russian intelligence asset. You left out the part where, when Russians representing the government offered intelligence on the Clintons and their campaign, the Trump campaign said "if it's what you say it is I love it, especially in the summer" instead of calling the FBI. You left out the fact that the Mueller report documented that the Russians DID engage in a huge disinformation campaign in favor of Trump, whether or not Trump approved of it or was aware of it in advance. You left out the fact that a Trump confidante and long-time GOP dirty trickster was the conduit between the stolen DNC emails and Wikileaks, with Russia as the conduit. You left out the fact that Trump stood on the world stage in Helsinki and publicly sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies and their thorough investigative work, which he generally refused to even read or be briefed on. And finally, you left out the part where Trump tried to shake down the president of Ukraine to announce an investigation of Biden - not to actually conduct one, not to actually find anything - just to dirty up Biden for his own electoral prospects, using aid money that Congress had already approved and the Trump administration was refusing to release unless the investigation was announced. (And almost every one of those GOP senators who refused to convict Trump for this extortion is now demanding something be done for Ukraine. Cowardly duplicitous twits, to the core.) Trump didn't give a shit about Europe's dependence on foreign energy. He wanted them to buy ours instead of the Russians', because he was stupid enough to think it was like anything else you can just put in a cargo container and ship across the ocean. That was part and parcel of his idea that America should re-invest in dirty energy (this from the man who thought windmills caused cancer). That last point alone disqualifies him from being considered a serious thinker on energy in any way, shape, or form. We became a net exporter of refined petroleum products in May 2011, and we were close to a net exporter of crude as well before Trump took office. The refined number is far more important, because while you can get crude oil from a lot of places, there are a lot fewer that can refine it; and while it may only take a few months to drill and locate a new source of oil (and some additional time to get it to market), it takes FAR longer to build a refinery complex to process it. So perhaps you should be thanking the president in office in 2011. It's worth remembering that demand might not have fallen so far if Trump's response to COVID hadn't been such an unmitigated disaster. It's worth remembering that unlike western Europe, the reason the US can commit so much money to defense is that we are willing to tolerate people dying from lack of access to health care. We're willing to tolerate old people freezing to death at home in winter or dying of heat stroke in the summer because we don't give a crap about the poor in this country. It's easy to be generous to defense contractors if you ignore your own people's needs, something the rest of the civilized western world does not. That's part of it. Let's remember who set the deadline for withdrawal at this impossible-to-meet-well date. And yes, Russia understands that thanks to decades of GOP wars-without-end (thank you so much, Shrub), especially ones levied without international consensus (thank you again, Shrub), Americans are no longer eager to send our troops into harm's way no matter how important the cause. (And yes, I fault Obama as well for failing to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan early in his presidency, but to be fair, he did have an economic crisis dumped in his lap on his way into office (thank you AGAIN, Shrub) to deal with. But let's also recognize that Putin didn't need to invade Ukraine while Trump was in power because Trump was (unwittingly, like most things he does) laying the ground work on behalf of Putin. He upended alliances, taught Europe that you couldn't count on America to keep its word, and in general tried to sabotage all the ties that bound the civilized, democratic governments of the world together as a force for the common good. Why WOULD Putin want to invade Ukraine when Trump was doing such a bang-up job of breaking apart the alliance that was most likely to stand in his way? New sanctions are being announced every day. The idea is to ratchet them up, hoping he'll at least call for a cease fire before maximum pressure in terms of sanctions has been applied. (Which is smart: once you've thrown everything you have at him, if he survives, he'll know he's not vulnerable to anything less than a direct military assault. If you can get him to blink for less, you have some reserve left.) True that the Mueller investigation said it could not PROVE a conspiracy with Russia (note it did not say they DISproved such a conspiracy, either). What it DID document, however, was that Russia unquestionably interfered in the election on Trump's behalf - what was unprovable, in large measure because Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel, was whether he or his campaign was in on it. As for the Steele Dossier, that's simply a bullshit take on it. For starters, the dossier was contracted and paid for by a research firm (Fusion GPS). Fusion, in turn, had been hired by a contract attorney, one of whose clients was the DNC; the DNC says, and the attorney confirms, that the attorney took this action on his own without the direction of the DNC, although the information gathered was afterward shared with the DNC. It's also important to note that the central finding of the dossier - that Russia had a preference for Trump over Clinton in the election and was taking action to help the former over the latter - was verified by Mueller and that finding is not in dispute among serious-minded people. It's also been proven that its claim that several high-level Trump campaign figures were in close contact and sharing information with Russian intelligence assets was also true. So "completely fabricated" is an outright lie. Some of the more sensational allegations (which were reported as rumors, not as facts) - like the infamous "Pee Tape" allegation - have neither been proven nor disproven - you can't prove something doesn't exist, only that it does (if it does). It is undoubtedly a flawed document that contains raw, unverified information, but it is far from "completely fabricated". Indeed, the parallels are striking. Just as in the late 1930's and early 40's, substantial figures - mostly wealthy white GOP and other right-leaning figures - constantly cautioned about getting involved in the war. It's not our fight, they said. We should stay over here and mind our own business. Who cares if Germany takes over Austria - aren't Austrians really sort of German, anyway? Who cares if they also take over Czechoslovakia - there's some Germans there, too, right? And the rest, they'll adapt. Poland? Europe's going to war over Poland? We need to say far away from that. This Hitler fellow, he can't be THAT bad - how much territory can he actually take, anyway? And then in short order, it was Denmark and Norway and Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg and France and Yugoslavia and Greece, and with Spain in Franco's hands and Italy in Mussolini's, basically all of Europe was under the control of a megalomaniac. And the right-wing was still crowing that we should stay out of war. We were almost prepared to abandon Great Britain, ancestor to the very concept of America, to the Nazis, but Roosevelt was able to persuade Congress otherwise. And then war came to us, anyway. We think that can't happen again, but then we have a 9/11. The lesson we need to learn is to not waste trillions of dollars on wars of choice so that when a war comes that we NEED to be involved in - to preserve the notion of democracy, which is what Putin is trying to extinguish - we are willing to fight back.

No one is suggesting we should be, except the imaginary bogeymen in the fevered brains of the irrational nuts who think we can retreat to within our borders and never deal with the outside world. I wasn't aware you'd been appointed to simultaneously serve in a majority of the seats of the Supreme Court of the United States. You haven't? Oh, well, then, maybe you just aren't the one who gets to decide whether the WPA is constitutional or not. But you should know this: every president has advocated that the WPA is unconstitutional, not because only Congress can declare war, but because as commander in chief, the President can deploy forces even without a formal declaration of war and the reporting requirements of the WPA infringe on the President's powers, not the other way around. While I agree that we need to do far more for our own people than we do, there is literally no provision of the Constitution that prohibits foreign aid. Your fevered imagination as to what the Constitution says is working overtime - I hope you're paying it time-and-a-half.

You said this in response to someone suggesting prayers aren't worth shit. You made a wild, unsubstantiated leap to the notion that he must therefore hate Christians. You're demonstrating a severe inability to make logical connections here.

So you reject the fact-gathering apparatuses of, say, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the like in favor of "real facts" from ... checking now... "clayandbuck.com". One of these doofuses is a lawyer who went on a pudding strike (eating only pudding for nearly two months, trying to pressure DirectTV to offer NFL Sunday Ticket in the US Virgin Islands. The other is someone Fox Sports euphemistically called a "radio personality" (because "sports journalist" engendered too many hysterical laughs). But you'll put more faith in what they pull out their asses to tell you over news organizations whose staff collectively have centuries of experience in uncovering the news and reporting it. JFC.

You are mistaking the current president, with whom the world community stands in solidarity, with the previous occupant of the Oval Office, for whom the international community had nothing but contempt (that is, except for the Dictator Caucus). You can support or oppose either party and either president, but you are not going to manufacture "alternative facts" about how the world community viewed the last president vs how they view the current one. Russia was not kept "at bay". Russia chose to bide its time while Hair Furor tried to tear the post-Cold War western alliances apart. He had no reason to move on Ukraine as long as Hair Furor was actively trying to drive a wedge between the US and its European allies. Putin was delighted to sit back and let the Mango Mussolini try to extort Ukraine for security assistance. Putin was delighted when his personal puppet tried to divide NATO over the amount of spending each would make on defense, deliberately mischaracterizing it as "unpaid back dues" to NATO. The previous occupant of the White House stood on an international stage and announced he took Putin's word over the combined work of all his own intelligence agencies, whose work he pointedly refused to even review on a regular basis. Of course Putin's moving now - not because Biden is weak, or perceived as weak, but because Biden is undoing the wreckage the last idiot left in his wake, and he knew his window of opportunity would be closing. Finally: as for keeping our economy pumping: Trump was the first president under whom the number of jobs had a net DECLINE - despite the roaring economy he inherited, which grew no faster under him than it had in the last few years of the Obama administration. His abysmal, incompetent mishandling of Covid not only led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, but caused hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars of damage to the economy. A rabid badger with a broken hind foot could have taken the economy inherited from Obama and managed it as well as Trump did. (The one thing I'll give him credit for: he wanted to provide the $2,000 per person stimulus payments but his own party, stingy rich capitalists to the core, cut it to $600. Biden got the remainder of the money approved, which is part of why the economy began recovering much more quickly under his administration than it was under the last months of Trump.)

That is addressed in dozens of responses to similar questions raised over and over again. The short answer is, that is confidential information; the site owners don't release the formula by which advancing from one level to another is granted, so as to prevent people from gaming the system. The longer answer is, read through this particular part of the forum - you'll see the reasoning explained in greater detail.

Since you mention 81 million votes - are you suggesting that the current president (recipient of those votes) was "weak" and allowed this tyrant to flourish?

What I do is hit the quote button, then chop off the irrelevant parts. And if I need to quote a second time from the same post (from a widely separated section) I just hit the quote button again, and repeat except deleting the original quote along with anything not needed the second round. Complex but seems to work.

Actually, when I hit "quote" on your post (which quotes me), it only quotes the parts YOU posted, not my original quote. That's how it SHOULD work. I'm not sure why ErosWired's quoting went astray, but it's definitely not working the way mine does (and yours did, above).

No need to apologize - I know you're not doing it deliberately (the quoting feature here can be wonky). It's as much "not wanting to take credit for someone else's words" as it is "don't show me saying things I didn't say". (This is a case where I agree about the importance of access to care where the person relocates.)

Wrong. Once again, someone thinks his own experience is the one and only experience that is suitable for everyone else in a group, and that anyone who doesn't adhere to his limited worldview is not a "true" whatever. It must be exhausting to think you have to speak on behalf of everyone.

You quoted me, but that wasn't me - that was fskn. Your point is actually a variation of the one I was originally making: aim for a large metro area, not a mid-sized city.

That's far more likely. Porn, unlike "real" film and TV shows, is shot wherever the producer can find a place; there are physical porn studios, but they're not fancy soundproofed buildings with ideal acoustics and powerful boom mics that can pick up the sounds needed, discreetly. They're shot wherever they can find a place, often in a house that someone lends them or an apartment or hotel room or whatever. So sound re-recording is often done, dubbing over the original tracks, and it's sometimes sloppy work. The actors may have grunted exactly in time with the action, but there's no guarantee even that the moans you're hearing are produced by the bottom on screen. Just as there are stunt dicks and stunt butts out there, there are stunt voices for the sex sounds.

As many people have noted, some bleeding is not uncommon. It's not "almost always" there, but there are factors which can aggravate it, as these folks can attest. However: bear in mind when you're watching videos, you may not even be seeing real cum. Lots of what you see in porn is faked (shocker!), and because of cuts from one camera to another, or stopping and starting from different angles, it's child's play for the porn producers to inject something cum-looking, but pristine and white and glistening (and probably tasting better) into a bottom's ass so that he can expel it on demand for a felching scene.

The risk of HIV infection in his case is pretty low if that number is correct and stable (ie not changing regularly up and down, which it might if he's not diligent about his meds). It used to be that anything below 50 was considered undetectable, because that's the lowest level that could be measured at the time. Now with improved techniques, it's possible to measure down to around 25, and that's where "undetectable" generally starts now.

Conceptually, this is great advice, but in reality, there's a problem in that very, very few places have rent control laws. The last tally I find shows 182 cities which have rent control within all or part of the city (for most, it's all). But 99 of those are in New Jersey alone. 63 are in New York. Only 18 cities in California have it, and otherwise only Washington, DC and Takoma Park, Maryland (a suburb of DC). That's it. Rent control does cover some very large areas, but basically nowhere other than parts of the two coasts. Also all very important.