TampaYankee

Sorry, I never made it past the very first episode. I think I made it through three of Lost before I bailed.

Better try harder as it hasn't been working too well. Lay off that Swiss cheese too. They bait traps with that stuff.

IMO this fellow is right on. Rather than restrict financial institutions to a manageable size that could be permitted to fail, Obama and the Congress allowed them to remain dangerously large and placed all fail-safes in the hands of the regulators which is where the system failed before. While there may be more regulations it still requires regulators to police the system. People can fail, regulatory zeal changes with political appointments. Many regulators look to get jobs in the industry they are supposed to be policing. This system requires proactive enforcement. We needed more passive protections like downsizing institutions and placing boundaries on the types of activities a single bank can engage in. Put simply, the architecture of our financial system remains inherently risky. Fianancial Reform did contain some positive things like the Comsumer Protection Agency and some limitations on derviatives. However, overall it is rather weak and remains risky. It is disturbing that Obama is proud and comfortable with what was passed. Summers and Geitner lead him down the garden path of more of the same Rubin policy with some window dressing and little more than street crossing guards to police the system. If left as is then the system will be abused and fail again. It's just a matter of time.

Arthur Levitt, Ex-SEC Chairman, SLAMS Financial Reform Bill The Huffington Post | William Alden First Posted: 10-20-10 09:10 AM | Updated: 10-20-10 09:14 AM Congress "ducked" on financial regulation, neglecting to solve the problems that caused the financial crisis, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt said. In an interview with the Street, Levitt, who now serves as a Goldman Sachs adviser, said the Dodd-Frank financial legislation, passed in July, accomplishes very little. It has left the regulatory bodies unfocused and ineffective, and it has failed to determine specific regulatory policy, he said. "What Congress did, in effect, was they highlighted a battery of issues and then turned it over to the regulators," Levitt said. "Its efforts at preventing 'too big to fail' and systemic risk, I think, were ill-advised." According to the Street interviewer, Levitt called the Dodd-Frank reform an "irrational mess" last week at the Loan Syndications and Trading Association conference. A real problem, Levitt said in the interview, is that regulatory powers are shared by a variety of agencies, allowing for dangerous inefficiency. Creating a "council of regulators" was "the wrong solution," "almost by definition," he said, referring to "turf battles" that will distract the regulatory bodies, which include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. "With the different balances of power ... [regulators] are bound not to be terribly effective and responsive, at a period when timing becomes of critical importance," Levitt said. "Streamlining certainly should have been done." The SEC and CFTC, for instance, should have been merged, he said. "Because of politics involved, they [Congress] simply ducked on that issue," he added. "The lobbying that had been focused on the Congress up until now is going to be focused on the CFTC, and the FDIC and the SEC and the new bureaucracy created by the consumer-protecting agency." See original article for interview video: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/arthur-levitt-sec-reform_n_769396.html

I take note of the fact that you live in France. Why is that? Are you hiding form a disgruntled spouse/bf/gf? The Tax Man? Are you Whitey Bulger?

ROFL I nominate you as the MER Poet Laureat and Philosopher-In-Residence.

I see you haven't tried Greek or Armenian.

If this is addressed to me then yes and no. It depends on the level you concentrate on. Globally, doing a female is different that doing a male. Different psyches, styles, buttons, approaches. On the local level, same warmth and tightness and moans. Both can be gentle or frenetic. Not sure how else to put it.

I don't recall getting a PM or email from you voicing your concerns about the review or 'MERs' finest' before pissing on us in the public square.

Pretty funny. She's a message candidate. I hope she makes a few points along the way. The hypocritical candidates can use some airing out.

Means nothing to me. Thirty plus years of work with not infrequent travel and I flew 1st class only once then only on one leg. My employer would not pay for 1st or business for that matter. That is what happens when your customer is the government. Paying out of pocket was out of the question with my short pockets. I appreciate for others it may be a pain.

You know... I think people just like to complain. We have complaints that were are boring and a snooze. We have complaints that we are dysfunctional drama. We have complaints that we are not a very friendly site to participate in -- as opposed to what???? How can all that be simultaneously??? We have a little drama to break the snoozes from time to time. Nothing like other sites though IMO. Almost none of it generated by the admins. Not sure that can be said for other sites. We do have an admin that takes only so much trashtalk before he let's his hair down on rare occasion. I plead guilty. Nothing compared to the admin heavy handedness of others site IMO. We have some people that complain about the excessive snoozing but I don't see their stats jumping off the page with their number of posts. We have some great contributors that more than carry their load (No puns here. ) with impressive stats and even better content. Oz and I very much appreciate their contributions. I wish they got more help from others but all we can do is give everyone an opportunity. They nitpick about small issues here , if not make them up, and overlook the same issues in a grander scale elsewhere. I'm sorry this thread didn't workout the way Lucky had hoped but we cannot let false information go unchallenged and sometimes I get my fill of trashtalk. I guess that is unique among message board admins according to some. I'd give my frank response to that but we are being a friendly site today.

I don't recall London as the roast suckling pig capital of the world. More kidney pie or bangers and mashed. You lucky you got out of their alive.

A spider maybe?

Please hold your water. Totally unnecessary. Ain't gonna happen. We are not involved in anything. An infrequent poster chose to slur us based on faulty information he was convinced was true. To remove the thread would only give false credence that there is something here. If the escort was blackmailed that is wrong and unfortunate for him. He has legal remedies although they may not be practical for him to pursue. If there was something we could do we would be supportive. I do not know what that would be. The escort has never contacted us in any way about any blackmail episode.

Sorry Oz, this is not accurate. I do care too but my concern does have limits. Sometimes I suffer piss-poor attitudes not so well. This time I gave expression to my thoughts. It happens on occasion.

One really cannot participate in an online forum without having to deal with antagonists. It is just part of the environment as much as air and water are. Unfortunate but true. One has to either address or ignore them and participate with those of interest. Thin skins won't be comfortable. What I find interesting, as an observer, is that the anonymous environment doesn't always thicken up those thin skins. Its one thing to deal with confrontation in person or with a real identity and another to interact through a keyboard behind a screen name. That anonymity is what I attribute so much online prickliness to. Nevertheless, it doesn't always seem to work that way. I find your phrase which I highlighted above offensive. What makes you think that he is any more one of MER's finest than you are. He does not represent us anymore than you do -- which means not at all. We are an online site open to anyone who can read information that you choose to share with others. Anyone can join who is over 18. We don't vouch for any of you. We offer you and others a platform to discuss and share information about escorts. We do our best to vett reviews and go a hell of a lot further than others to do so IMNSHO. Quite frankly, your attitude as indicated by your choice of words SUCKS. If that offends you then (edited for decorum). Oz will address the facts of your complaint if you stick around to read them. I don't give a damn whether you do or not as the reply is only important for the others who read your complaint. Good for you. If I could turn your individual access off to our reviews I would since you feel no need to share and they offend you. If we were into throwing people out for noncapital offenses I'd show you the door just for pissing off the barkeep. But we don't. Enjoy the site or not, I don't give a damn. Stick this post in your not a real friendly environment folder and file it. Oz, don't bother trying to smooth this over. He is a weak contributor with a pissy attitude and not worth the effort. TY

Boy, photos like that used to launch me in orbit when I was a young adolescent. It was always a challenge, usually a loosing one, to try to sneak some peeks before the newstand clerk sent your packing.

Now we are talking real feast cookery. Had a neighbor do one some years ago. Took 24 hours of cooking and it melted like butter in your mouth except for the cracklin'. Foremost requirement is an army to feed.

What time should I be there to eat? Sounds delish...

No reason if you don't mind some podunk Federal Judge in the panhandle of Texas declaring Health Care or even Medicare unconstituional under President Palin.

I think you mean 'blackmail'? What would Freud say?

Way back in my college days, well grad school actually, I dated a girl who was curious about anal. Her previous bfs had refused to experiment -- a head thing I guess. She went into orbit over it. The next day her roommate wanted to know what I had done to my date and would I do it to her. I took this not so much as a testament to my prowess as much as the discovery of a new door to pleasure -- so to speak. Of course it is clear I didnt suck either.

Oil change reignites debate over GPS trackers By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press Writer – Sat Oct 16, 2:30 pm ET SAN FRANCISCO – Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old computer salesman and community college student, took his car in for an oil change earlier this month and his mechanic spotted an odd wire hanging from the undercarriage. The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it. Two days later, FBI agents arrived at Afifi's Santa Clara apartment and demanded the return of their property — a global positioning system tracking device now at the center of a raging legal debate over privacy rights. One federal judge wrote that the widespread use of the device was straight out of George Orwell's novel, "1984". "By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives," wrote Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a blistering dissent in which a three-judge panel from his court ruled that search warrants weren't necessary for GPS tracking. But other federal and state courts have come to the opposite conclusion. Law enforcement advocates for the devices say GPS can eliminate time-consuming stakeouts and old-fashioned "tails" with unmarked police cars. The technology had a starring role in the HBO cops-and-robbers series "The Wire" and police use it to track every type of suspect — from terrorist to thieves stealing copper from air conditioners. That investigators don't need a warrant to use GPS tracking devices in California troubles privacy advocates, technophiles, criminal defense attorneys and others. The federal appeals court based in Washington D.C. said in August that investigators must obtain a warrant for GPS in tossing out the conviction and life sentence of Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner convicted of operating a cocaine distribution ring. That court concluded that the accumulation of four-weeks worth of data collected from a GPS on Jones' Jeep amounted to a government "search" that required a search warrant. Judge Douglas Ginsburg said watching Jones' Jeep for an entire month rather than trailing him on one trip made all the difference between surveilling a suspect on public property and a search needing court approval. "First, unlike one's movements during a single journey, the whole of one's movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil," Ginsburg wrote. The state high courts of New York, Washington and Oregon have ruled similarly. The Obama administration last month asked the D.C. federal appeals court to change its ruling, calling the decision "vague and unworkable" and arguing that investigators will lose access to a tool they now use "with great frequency." After the D.C. appeals court decision, the 9th Circuit refused to revisit its opposite ruling. The panel had concluded that agents could have gathered the same information by following Juan Pineda-Moreno, who was convicted of marijuana distribution after a GPS device alerted agents he was leaving a suspected "grow site." "The only information the agents obtained from the tracking devices was a log of the locations where Pineda-Moreno's car traveled, information the agents could have obtained by following the car," Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote for the three-judge panel. Two other federal appeals court have ruled similarly. In his dissent, Chief Judge Kozinski noted that GPS technology is far different from tailing a suspect on a public road, which requires the active participation of investigators. "The devices create a permanent electronic record that can be compared, contrasted and coordinated to deduce all manner of private information about individuals," Kozinksi wrote. Legal scholars predict the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately resolve the issue since so many courts disagree. George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr said the issue boils down to public vs. private. As long as the GPS devices are attached to vehicles on public roads, Kerr believes the U.S. Supreme Court will decide no warrant is needed. To decide otherwise, he said, would ignore a long line of previous 4th Amendment decisions allowing for warrantless searches as long as they're conducted on public property. "The historic line is that public surveillance is not covered by the 4th Amendment," Kerr said. All of which makes Afifi's lawyer pessimistic that he has much of a chance to file a successful lawsuit challenging the FBI's actions. Afifi is represented by Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic civil rights group. Afifi declined comment after spending last week fielding myriad media inquiries after wired.com posted the story of his routine oil change and it went viral on the Internet. Still, Billoo hopes the discovered GPS tracking device will help publicize in dramatic fashion the issue of racial profiling the lawyer says Arab-Americans routinely encounter. She said Afifi was targeted because of his extensive ties to the Middle East, which include supporting two brothers who live in Egypt and making frequent overseas trips. His father was a well-known Islamic-American community leader who died last year in Egypt. "Yasir hasn't done anything to warrant that kind of surveillance," Billoo said. "This was a blatant example of profiling." See original article at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101016/ap_on_re_us/us_gps_tracking_warrants

How many of those do you think are participants of the other site but can't bring themselves out of the closet over here? Honestly, I have no idea but wonder.