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I prefer keeping my "servers" Local.....

Not the world. Plenty of ass available here in Bangkok .

Very very beautiful. The second (and subsequent!) dates will be even more sublime.

Only meant that I believe Oz hosts this site with a service provider located in India (or is it Thailand?) where (1) U.S. law does not apply, and (2) hosting & site development costs are lower than in the U.S.

The problem is that rentmen is also in jeopardy as are all sites that promote escorting/hustling. Although rentmen is based in a foreign country, U.S. advertisers (and their clients) are located in the U.S. and those advertisers pay for their ads with U.S. credit cards. Thus, U.S. (through the payment method) has jurisdiction over foreign providers with respect to blocking the sites (and they will be blocked). Obviously, the U.S. cannot apply criminal sanctions on foreign based providers. The only way the U.S. can enforce the new hideous law is for the U.S. to demand that such sites are blocked to U.S. internet providers and to their customers. Thus, it will only be a matter of time before your own internet provider blocks access to sites that promote escorting/hustlers et cetera. Not a pretty picture. No doubt about it, the new "law" that passed on Friday dealt the gay community (and other groups) a major blow. It is back to the jungle for much of America and gays who read escort sites.

https://rentmen.eu/ would seem perfectly positioned now. The online now and near me features are nice. Yes, you mostly have to call/text but at least there's pretty good indication of what's on the menu first. It's just double (/triple) the price... :o[

Here where I am, a call takes 45 seconds. You say what you want, he says what he delivers and where he is, you go there and fuck like rabbits. For $100-$150/hour. What's complicated about that?

Thank you. There is also the factum that the current broad understanding -- misunderstanding, one should say -- of the Second Amendment as guaranteeing the right of private citizens to own any class of firearm, up to and including military-grade -- for the purpose of defending against potential encroachments from their own government -- was fabricated out of whole cloth and put about by Colt and by Smith & Wesson after the end of the Civil War, when their war-bloated sales volumes predictably fell off a cliff. That understanding has nothing whatever to do with the Framers' intent in the Second Amendment, which as stated before was to ensure state militias had ready-to-hand arms to respond in the event of slave uprisings.

Well, as John Oliver and Jim Jefferies and several others go into in great depth in videos available on YouTube, Australia started to. But after one of these incidents shook them they stood up and enacted tough gun control laws, took back a shitload of guns. Yes, people living in the outback and hunting still have guns suited to their needs. No incidents since. Same in Europe with similar laws. Vastly less shootings in Canada despite similar culture (/dissimilar laws). Our main problem is the NRA which is wholly funded by the gun lobby which makes extra money every time there's one of these shootings because people decide they have to have the weapons used in the murder of children while they can still get them. NRA mostly uses their money, but also the argument it's the second amendment. The latter is powerful but far more explicit amendments and even actual clauses are either ignored (emoluments clause, anybody?) or given conditions every fucking day. Not the second though! Except the first part of it, which is ignored... The biggest problem with the second amendment as sacrosanct (of course ignoring the 'well regulated' and 'militia' parts) are two fold: 1) The intention of the Constitution was for the US to NOT have a standing army--hence wanting a militia and the idea they could appose a similarly equipped fascistic militia--as opposed to the most powerful military in the history of the planet... 2) The vastly increased lethality and speed of modern war-fighting weapons. Because of the above, anything less than an AR-15 gives me exactly 0% chance to stand up to an A-10 warthog with hellfire missiles... (Lets ignore that a well armed and perfectly trained civilian's chance would still be 0.00X%.) But that's the only possible justification. Modern repeating magazine weapons would not be recognizable to the founders. And other countries don't allow them yet are perfectly stable, and countries where an AK-47 is more common than a textbook have their governments overthrown and people oppressed every fucking day. But nobody wants to truly think through these issues and admit the obvious instances of cognitive dissonance or outright hypocrisy in their positions. Because they're told it's IN THE CONSTITUTION and HERE'S SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS for your PAC. Any discussion gets shut down in ways that are intellectually bankrupt. It's a mental health issue but NRA lobbied and banned the CDC from studying gun deaths even though it's one of the larger causes of death in the US. And lobbied against and removed rules against mentally ill from getting guns. And stop any kind of system that would actually enforce any of the few rules remaining on the books consistently.

There is no "street scene" I can find in LA anymore. Cruised Santa Monica BLVD a couple times lately, nada.

It is a video attempting to be humorous about Brazilian politicians and how they are scumbags.

... At another party in Key West, in 1936, a swaggering Stevens loudly impugned the manhood of Ernest Hemingway. When Hemingway showed up, Stevens took a swing at him, and Hemingway knocked him down. Stevens got up and landed a solid punch to Hemingway’s jaw, which broke his hand in two places. Hemingway then battered him, but later cheerfully accepted his meek apology. They agreed to a cover story: Stevens had been injured falling down stairs. But the Florida sojourns provided Stevens with more than occasions for feckless behavior. The natural elements and the weather set him to wide-awake dreaming on his biggest theme: the capacity of fiction to encompass, and to master, experiences of reality. The enchantment of the voluptuous setting peaks in the fifty-six lines of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which begins, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” The speaker and a shadowy companion observe a girl or a woman singing by an ocean that is “Like a body wholly body, fluttering / Its empty sleeves.” The singer’s song, “uttered word by word,” overlays and opposes “the dark voice of the sea,” in a duet that becomes a contest crowned with triumph: At last, the poet names his companion, Ramon Fernandez, by addressing him. (Though Stevens denied it, he surely had in mind a French critic of that name, the son of a Mexican diplomat, whose rationalist bias made him a perfect foil for the poem’s endorsement of intuition.) He says: And, finally: Those “sounds”—sea depths answered by human ones—resonate like organ chords in a cathedral of the imagination. Appreciation of Stevens’s poetry grew—the critic F. O. Matthiessen wrote that it expressed “truths with the mellowness and tang of a late-summer wine”—but his home life languished. Holly disappointed him by proving unremarkable and by becoming engaged to an office-equipment repairman whom Stevens (echoing his father’s rejection of Elsie) called a “Polack” and a Communist. He boycotted the wedding and was relieved when, a year later, she divorced the man, on grounds of cruelty. Between trips to accept book awards and honorary doctorates, Stevens continued to go to work each day into his seventies, even after surgery for a stomach obstruction revealed a metastasizing cancer. He was too august at the firm to be let go, but he was never popular there. His boss remarked, “Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart.” Before he died, in 1955, he accepted Catholic baptism from a hospital chaplain, who said that Stevens hadn’t needed “an awful lot of urging on my part except to be nice to him.” The conversion was more poetic than devotional in spirit, Mariani speculates, but, perhaps, “being a surety lawyer—he opted to sign on the dotted line at the end.” Like other critics I’ve read, Mariani ignores the details of Stevens’s day job, probably as being too mundane to merit attention, but they speak to me. Stevens’s specialties, surety and fidelity, turn profits from cautiously optimistic bets on human nature. (Surety covers defaulted loans and fidelity employee malfeasance.) Something very like such calculated risk operates in his poetry: little crises in consciousness, just perilous enough to seem meaningful. The endings are painstakingly managed victories for the poet’s equanimity. The aim, he once explained, was a “vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains.” That self devolved, over time, from grandeur into grandiosity, as Stevens labored over a myth of the poet as a secular spiritual hero. His ingenious arguments for the superiority of poetry over philosophy in his one book of essays, “The Necessary Angel” (1951), would be more persuasive if they seemed to designate any poet other than himself. But dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. And if a primary function of poetry is to expand and enrich the scope of a native language, Stevens has no equal in American English except Walt Whitman. The critic R. P. Blackmur listed nineteen words that Stevens had fished from obscurity, including “fubbed,” “gobbet,” “diaphanes,” “pannicles,” “carked,” “rapey,” “cantilena,” “fiscs,” “phylactery,” “princox,” and “funest.” Blackmur noted that such usage had given Stevens “a bad reputation among those who dislike the finicky, and a high one, unfortunately, among those who value the ornamental sounds of words.” But, he continued, “not a word listed above is used preciously.” Each served a feeling of the poet’s that, Blackmur guessed, “did not exist, even in his own mind, until he had put it down in words.” Certainly, Stevens’s poems precipitate rainstorms of sudden feelings, some of them hitting and others eluding a given reader’s comprehension. To savor the drenching effect, read him aloud, with attention to what Williams called his “thrumming in four-beat time.” The mind that can distinguish, in “The Snow Man,” between the “nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is” becomes your own. Stop when exhausted. Then you may want to consult Mariani’s superb biography, to plumb the aesthetic mysteries and register the human complications of so prodigious a gift. ♦ Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.” Read more »

Moving your servers abroad seems not a money-loser?