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hi fellows, I'm now in Madrid and I visited Adam Sauna this afternoon. Few clients and boys, maybe double number of working guys than customers. many a kind of stero-guys, mostly from Brazil and Romania, some from other Latinamerican countries. I had a nice encounter with a very cute young gutty (23y.o.) from Dakkar? Hard, defined body and short rastas. We both came, so I gave him 60... his name is Samba, a funny and cute young man. Very goog kisser.

AS- Your grandmother and most of the older members of my family would have gotten along famously. Many of them loved squirrel, frogs, rabbits, fresh milk (ugh) and many other "wild varmints". I was (and am) able to tolerate some of those but if your grandmother had a recipe for quail with pan gravy I would be her servant forever. Best regards, RA1

I think this is a nonstarter, not only the mandatory homo-sex but going the way of the Shakers. That solution achieves the same outcome as the problem it is trying to solve. Jonathan Swift had a much more practical, if modest, proposal. .

You need no further proof that, unlike Elvis, Jimmy is dead and buried. He'd never put feathers in his sausage. Kraft or whoever owns the label today has the nerve to put 'Original' on their package of precooked links but if you read the small print, it says made of pork and turkey. That ain't original at all. Like trying to sneak 50% lettuce past a committed life-long smoker or ten ounces of piss in a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Someone just tweeted: Last week: NSA has access to Apple's cloud; This week: New OS X will store your passwords in Apple's cloud #WWDC #PRISM

So it will work when shipped?

ACLU published a brief piece noting among other things what a crock is the claim that NSA's shenanigans have been subject to "judicial review." Checks, Balances, and the National Security AgencyBy Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU & Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 10:14am This column was originally published on MSNBC.com. Over the course of three days, the usually invisible National Security Agency has become ostentatiously visible and many Americans do not like what they see. In an effort to address the widely shared feeling that our vaunted system of checks and balances has utterly failed us, President Obama reassured the public Friday that the now-exposed spy programs were sanctioned by "all three branches of government." Is that true? Yes and no. There's no question, of course, that the executive branch backed the programs. In fact, both President George W. Bush and President Obama enthusiastically embraced the surveillance authorities that were used to justify them. Bush lobbied Congress to enact the USA Patriot Act in 2001 and the FISA Amendments Act in 2008. Obama urged Congress to reauthorize both of these statutes. And Congress did enact these statutes and then reauthorize them, so it certainly deserves a great deal of the blame for the massive privacy intrusions that were disclosed this past week. But, as we were reminded when several members of Congress came forward to say that they had been unaware that the NSA was using the Patriot Act to collect phone data from millions of Americans, it can be very difficult for Congress to conduct oversight of top secret, highly compartmentalized intelligence programs. In fact, it seems certain that many members of Congress voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act provision at issue here—Section 215—without even knowing what they were authorizing. What about the courts? It's true that a specialized intelligence court issued the orders approving the NSA's seizure of Americans' phone records—but the FISA court is no ordinary court. It meets in secret, allows only the government to appear before it, and rarely publishes its decisions. When the American Civil Liberties Union attempted to challenge the NSA's surveillance authority in ordinary federal court, the government succeeded in having the case dismissed on the grounds that we couldn't prove that our plaintiffs had been subjected to surveillance—because, of course, that surveillance is top secret. So at best, judicial review has amounted to a secret court upholding a secret program by secretly re-interpreting a federal law. That's hardly the kind of firm endorsement by "all three branches" that the president's comments suggested. And if we're asking whether our system of checks and balances is actually working, we should ask not only about oversight conducted by Congress and the judiciary but also about oversight conducted by the public. Can anyone seriously suggest that the public ever had an opportunity to evaluate the wisdom, necessity, or legality of the programs that were disclosed this past week? In his comments Friday, Obama said that he "welcomes" a debate about the proper limits on government surveillance. We welcome that debate, too. But why are we having this debate only now? Why was all of this secret for so long? The surveillance information revealed this week did not disclose any operational details that would aid our enemies—there was no conceivable justification for keeping the American people in the dark until now. We should have had this debate before Congress authorized these sweeping powers, and certainly before the executive branch implausibly interpreted them to permit dragnet surveillance of Americans' communications. It is probably safe to assume that the NSA is engaged in other surveillance that has implications for Americans' constitutional rights. The ACLU is currently fighting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to learn more about the government's interpretation of Section 215, but so far the Obama administration has refused to say anything about what kinds of spying it believes the provision permits. If Obama genuinely welcomes a debate over surveillance authorities, will his administration declassify enough information to permit an informed public debate, or will we have to wait for the next leak? This past week's disclosures show that we need stricter limits on government surveillance, and stronger oversight mechanisms to ensure that those limits are honored. The suggestion that our system of checks and balances is working is wrong. http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/checks-balances-and-national-security-agency

From your lips . . .

A thread I can't even kibitz in. The ACLU says it all.

According to a Pew poll conducted over the last few days, 56% find the NSA's blanket phone call tracking to be an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism. Personally, I belong to the 41% who doesn't. Not only is there what I believe to be a healthy wariness of unbridled government intrusion, but I also am not aware of any tangible benefit offered by the government in return for giving up even some, let alone all, of my privacy. I hear, along with everyone else, that giving up privacy is one of the sacrifices we must make to keep us safer from terrorists. But those statements are nothing but fluff. The phrase "more wiggle room than an anorexic belly dancer" comes to mind. Before I would consider making such a deal, I'd want to know what we'd get in return. For example, how many terrorists would be neutralized if we repealed the Fourth Amendment in its entirety? Has anyone every heard even a single quantifiable benefit we'd receive in return for unending surveillance? And would the NSA stop asking for further loss of rights even then? Is it unpatriotic to ask what kind of a deal we're making before we make it? I also think the paranoid/trusting dichotomy is not a very useful one. Are we ever really one or the other? I have no trouble at all being, at the very same time, both trusting of the intentions of the vast majority of government officials and wary of the intentions of others; and both optimistic about today, and cautious about tomorrow. In fact, if I ever lost the ability to be both, I'd seriously consider upping my sessions to at least twice a week.

Don't quite see how to top that. Agree that squirrels are just tree-rats. Although my grandma noted they have one virtue: when varmints are what there is to eat, squirrels are preferable to rabbits because a squirrel eats a relatively clean diet of nuts, so is liable to taste better than a rabbit whose flesh will reek of whatever noxious weed it last chomped on. We will pass over her shuddering descriptions of the taste of mud turtles and eels, both favorites of her own grandmother who was in the family's opinion regrettably adept at catching both.

Just so. ...One would love to hear the color commentary on same with which MsGuy can no doubt regale us.

For hitoall ... one down, two to work on!