PozBearWI

8 hours ago, Erik62 said:

I still think that religion has a part to play in today's society. It provides a base-line for developing a moral compass. These religious "mantras" may or may not change as we get older (some priests, teachers, people in authority). It is undeniable that a child brought up in a family unit of physical/emotional /verbal abuse risks an adult life in a similar vein. 

I came out of a family charged with physical/ emotional/verbal abuse: father, mother & older sibling. Had it not been for my weekly Sunday school & ministers guidance, I do not believe I would be the person: caring, loving, socially aware that I am today. 

Yes, I have prejudices, racial, social, motor car drivers, airlines etc but, just because I disagree with Netanyahu’s actions does not mean I would refuse help to a Jew on the street. 

I am not perfect but, I have molded my religious instruction into a model that best fits me, dropping tenets, against homosexuality, alcohol (I'm a Methodist 😱), contraception, sex before marriage & de-facto relationships but I also don't necessarily believe in at will abortions (being male & gay, my view doesn't / shouldn't be relevant anyway). 

Without religion we ended up with Lenin, Stalin, Idi Amin, Xin Ping & ALL THE OTHERS who use it as a cover, Hitler, Trump, Putin, Nasrullah, bin Laden, Netanyahu & his radical zionists.

I'll stick with the values instilled in me by my religious education 🙏😇🕊️🕊️🕊️. 

Thanks.  FWIW (for what its worth) I strongly support religious freedom.  However if your religion instructs you to kill me for my beliefs, we have a problem right?  

Oh lord NOT the way HIV/AIDS were dealt with.  For the first few years to our President AIDS was the solution, not a problem.  

Ooooh baby if I was a fortune teller.  Probably we're all safe though to recognize that things will differ a month from now, a couple months after that, this coming Fall...  It could turn into an utter shit show.  But maybe it won't.  

JD might be too busy fucking the couch in the oval office...  LOL

You've lived; hit challenges and got through.  Yeah we're all susceptible to picking up prior behaviors which hurt us.  Helps to know when we're in danger.  I'm glad you're here @Poz50something.

6 minutes ago, DallasPozzible said:

Just spitballing, but what if both Trump and Musk lose control? I suspect that the four guys Musk has rummaging through the government systems have numerous back doors by now that any one of them could exploit. They may have even more power than Musk. What do they do with this information? How long will it take for Putin to put them to work?

I just don’t think we have a clue of where we’re headed. 

Indeed.  We have clues only in that we have alternatives we can envision.  But what will actually happen remains to be seen.  My very UNscientific poll among people I know suggests their early thinking involved guns.  And yeah that could I suppose happen.  Maybe even 5050 odds of a civil war.  But maybe odds are greater than I think....

I think speed of intervention will have a large influence on longer term outcomes.  

That would give those who wish to go after, let's say finally eliminate all those gay people so they won't reproduce, and then they will cease to exist...  Not unlike 100 years ago as Germany devolved into it's despicable outcome. 

44 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

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.

Costa Rica 25 years ago, vs now, and potentially where it may be 25 years from now...

10 hours ago, insatiableholeinTO said:

So if the vaccine let's say saves 10 million lives, but kills 2 million, is that acceptable?

KILLS

If the proposed drug kills someone; we would know early in the game; the drug trial would end and things go back to be studied.   So when you write the drug kills xyz, that just won't happen.  Now we might see some percentage of the group exposed to new(ish) treatment XYZ manifest other health conditions later on.  But inferring that was "caused" by the vaccine would be unanticipated.  We've had unhappy things happen while trying new treatments.  If the option is "do nothing" vs "learn and do the best we can"; why would we not side for the latter?

The trials we do are a pretty good predictor of how a new vaccine will work among the full population.  It is nonetheless true we are working with diverse humans.  At initial roll out the first users are the final guinea pig.  Perhaps you've forgotten that during the Covid19 initial vaccinations they were rolled out by risk.  Those who might die sooner anyway but for whom avoidance of the pathogen lessens a hasty death.  My group;  HIV poz, otherwise immune compromised, seniors with some underlying conditions were that first Covid vaccination group.  It would be interesting to grab those stats specifically; how many of us were adversely affected by the vaccine and how infections rates evolved between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.  

SAVES

Context is relevant here.  The words you used were "(it) saves 10 million lives".  Knowing how many lives were "saved" requires us to know what would have happened vs what actually happened.  And while we can measure things to gain a trajectory of likely outcomes; we don't know specific numbers.  By tracking information and grouping them into those we did X to and those we didn't do X to; gives us one way of considering outcomes.  From that we can calculate what what likely would have happened.  But it is a calculation.   

If you meant,  2 million died rather than 12 million from the disease we are attempting to control; I am pretty damned happy with that number.  

A more accurate metric would be when we compare the frequency and severity of infections between vaccinated and unvaccinated.  And if you listen to any statement about Covid vaccine, it's goal was to reduce frequency and severity of infection.  They absolutely do not guarantee you won't get infection by the targeted pathogen. 

If we're watchful, some of that USAID sorta work, we can detect and contain a new pathogen to as small as possible geographic region as we can.  Initial containment limits progression and sometimes that is self correcting (looking back on human history).  My HIV resistance directly connected to the Black Plague survivors.  

We implemented AZT largely as an experiment rather than do nothing until we achieved perfection.  

So the number you pose is unlikely, but honest if I am one of the 10 million, that is 10 million ostensibly happy people vs zero.  I imagine there are stats one can pull that would give us the details of 85 yo 95 treatment success ratio.  

7 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

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. 

Thank you!

It would not be the first stupid venture Donny posed, started and failed in.  

What is unclear is he speaking as Donny the guy who buys (rather than develops) real estate?  Or as POTUS?  It is quite unclear if he sees a difference.  He seems to have deluded himself into believing he owns the USA.  

Adding to @BootmanLA 2-1-1 use of PrEP has been approved for some time now.  Meaning even that doesn't necessarily have to be taken daily unless you have raw anonymous sex daily.  IF that is the case it would be worthwhile do discuss with your doctor how to manage your comparatively unique case with your doc.  

But to our Donny appointed SCOTUS guys R v W was "settled law".  

1 hour ago, BootmanLA said:

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. 

Yup, that's the one... 

On 2/8/2025 at 2:45 PM, NWUSHorny said:

or an '86 model with the 3.8 swapped out for an Iron duke 4 banger with 150K miles. I can't resist filling Trump's junk yard with the worst examples of the Buick Riviera ever built.

I thought the trend was to replace the IC engine with a Tesla Drive train in classic cars???  Maybe that's what Donny meant by Riviera.  

54 minutes ago, BootmanLA said:

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.

And while accepting and supporting of each other, we don't have to pick "the" solution.  For example, I am concerned about the use of some medical intervention early in life.  I'm uncertain puberty blockers will in the long run not be viewed as we view electroshock therapy or lobotomies 50 years from now.  

Religion made all sorts of sense centuries ago.  Whether the "sometimes" intellect we humans display in the larger sea of what Hilary referred to as deplorables comes from a deity or is simply how we have evolved as a species doesn't change who and we are today.  Religion hasn't been a bad way to look at things when we haven't developed skills to explain our world;  

Mediums these days do a big business when they get followers.  Fortune tellers are nothing new.  Right there with snake oil salesmen, and IMO a few steps below prostitutes in the career scale which have been around throughout our ability to record a history.  We've a history, even in the USA's short 250ish years, of exploiting our neighbors and fucking them behind their mates back.  

We assume since we have a birth and death, everything else must as well.  And we refer to that "on-going-ness" I think as 'god'.  Religions developed social controls.  I'm not sure "the board" sat down one day and did that; but they've evolved to be the arbiters of moral behaviors.  All have a "god" figurehead with whom no one alive can actually shake hands with.  Which is quite convenient. But the common thread around a good part of the differing religions are around survivability of the religion.  So it became quite popular among humans to kill humans who didn't believe the same stories they did.  Sort of like killing people for not believing Harry Potter's books aren't diaries of a real life.  As we've grown as a species we.  Rather rapidly; doubling twice now in my lifetime.  

We are for multiple reasons facing some big human decisions again as we approach the 100th anniversary of WW2.  It has been a pretty good run.  There are a lot of viable options if we can shift from catering to the few to catering to the most.  We may see this rather soon, this year or next; or we'll weather through, achieve stasis for awhile; and then experience whatever methods get chosen for resolution.  

Dayum @BootmanLA  Can I use this as an example of a cogent reply if I ever  publish a dictionary?  🙂

... I could be Louis.  A lifetime of bareback gave me other STI's but HIV remained elusive.  If the goal is seroconversion, fucking is an inefficient way to accomplish that.  But I could also be the protagonist.  My hubby and I have had similar conversations.  Many of us eventually come to realize that a relationship isn't sex any more than a relationship is doing laundry or mowing the lawn.  

25 minutes ago, Falls727 said:

That pisses me off that people in the day and age are so ignorant and judgemental. I would love to breed you. You sound really sexy!

That's mutual @Falls727.  You've an open invitation to my dungeon when you next visit Wisconsin.  I hope you would make that a fun stop on your visit.  

@pozpopperpig as lovely as that would be, he stopped writing this eleven years ago.  And in fact he last logged in eleven years go.  Doubtful there is a continuation coming.... 

It is one of my frustrations with our pattern here on BZ of authors not finishing their stories.  Some of course do have closure, even if us readers can envision continuations.  But many just give up mid stream.  Like pulling out midway and going home...  

No doubt about that @NicNorth

@Erik62 we certainly have good reason to not trust Mr Vance.  But at end I believe the struggle will be between Trump and his fuck buddy Musk.  

1 hour ago, PozBearWI said:

@hntnhole indeed neither party is without fault, both have moved to their wingtips which only lasts awhile.  Then the center majority eventually will do something.  I am though concerned about how that will be done when all the financial control has been moved out of the legislature, and they continue to just let that happen.  

To clarify, T man gave Muskrat the passwords to all the accounts, plus unlocked the building, shoved the others aside and had him take over. Judges can make rulings till the cows come home (or more likely get lost now that no one is watching them); unless he is stopped, the passwords changed and his (very likely) spyware removed he is in control of the federal Treasury.  Unvetted, just handed over...  If anyone doesn't get the significance of this you're in for an unpleasant surprise.  The guy running the show is Musk...

5 hours ago, Skyclad said:

Hey there - just joined the site and stumbled upon it by accident. Hoping to take some time to check it out and see what it has to offer. Mostly bottom and into many kinks and fetishes.

We're definitely a group demonstrating a nice array of our own fetishes; barebacking being our common bond.