MsGuy

The American Embassy shut down in 1961. It sat empty until 1977 when the State Department moved back in under the fiction that it was the United States Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy. The building is located on the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Platform on the bay, near the Cuban Foreign Ministry complex. I suspect that functionally the US Interests Section is not that much different from a regular Embassy but I don't know that for a fact. It could be that they are under special restrictions about what they can do to help you if you get your ass in a crack. I'm sure the Section will send you some pamphlets explaining their situation if you e-mail them.

Thank you for the information & the link, lookin. I did not know that about the Sinai negotiations.

One could argue that the intended effect of Bibi's trip is to put 2 or 3 extra Likud MKs in the Knesset in furtherance of his efforts to squeek back into office one more time. Similarly one could argue the intended effect of the attack ads is to raise the profile of the PAC and draw in more donations. One could even argue that the intended effect of Boehner's invitation in the first place was to boost his shaky hold on the Speakership. Against such weighty matters what matters trivia like the Israeli-American strategic partnership or sabotaging international efforts to force Iran to delay developing nuclear weapons?

Even before he makes his speech, a Republican affiliated PAC is using Netanyahu's trip to run attack ads against Hilary Clinton and wedge open a split in the Democratic party.

Best teaser from tomorrow's episode: Old lady client (grinning): "I thought all lawyers were idiots." Saul (grinning back): "Only half are idiots; the other half are crooks."

Sometimes I see myself in a comic strip.

I understand why Bohner extended the invitation to speak. Republicans have been working for decades to make support for Israel a wedge issue to split off Jewish Americans from the Democrats. But Israel and its American supporters (as opposed to pols who find it useful to be seen to support Israel) have been careful to avoid this trap. For several years, Netanyahu has been winking and nodding to American Jews that they should support the Republican party but openly challenging a sitting Democratic American president in this way is completely over the top. The Democrats are furious; serious people in Israel are horrified.

And now 180 retired generals have come forward to publicly denounce Bibi's behavior as a danger to the security of Israel. LOL, how many retired generals can a country like Israel have? 180 has got to be a hell of a lot of them.

I suspect the Shah, the Ayatollah and all those folks who lived in Iran at the time had a little something to do with it.

I don't see why there couldn't be a BoyToy barrister.

The former head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, speaks out on the damage Bibi is doing to Israel: "An Israeli prime minister who enters into a confrontation with the US administration needs to consider the risks. When it comes to the settlements, there is no difference between the two parties. Nonetheless, we are protected by the American veto power. If we are at odds with the White House, we could lose that protection and, within a short space of time, find ourselves facing international sanctions. "The risks involved in such a confrontation are intolerable. We are already paying prices today. Some I know about but cannot elaborate on." Dagan doesn't limit his criticism of Netanyahu to his de facto alliance with Republicans. Apparently even conservatives in the Israeli foreign policy establishment fear that his crude conduct of Israel's affairs are damaging their future.

Why do I feel like I fell down a rabbit hole? And popped out in The Big Bang Theory? BAZINGA!

1) ISIS guys aren't psychopaths, lookin, or no more so than most men that tote guns and shoot people. They're just folks who would cheerfully saw off you head with a dull knife to make a point (& post a video of it on YouTube afterwards). Not the same thing at all. Seriously, that's not the same. 2) Bush #1's people said back in the '90s that the reason he didn't knock off Saddam the first time around was he was worried about events in Iraq spinning out of our control if he brought down Saddam.

I think you're right on track about the psychological aspects of this stuff, lookin, but biologically a stem child is not the same thing as a clone.

Well, let's say we would be looking for nasty recessives since bad dominant genes would already be expressed in you (&/or your sister). If you are doubled on the nasty recessive loci, they also would have expressed, so no surprises there either. OK, let's also say neither you nor your sister has a long prehensile tail (or what ever it is we're worried about) but your mother carries the LPT recessive gene. There would be one chance in four of your child needing a quick tail bob soon after birth. Now suppose we allow your poor sister get back to your cousins and go the stem child route. Further suppose you have the LPT recessive. There would be a 50% chance of one of your stem sperm carrying the LPT gene and likewise a 50% chance of your stem egg carrying the LPT gene or a 25% chance of you being able to hang the kid around your neck while you kept both hands free to prepare its formula. So it's a wash on incest related genetic disorders, stem child vs. sister child. I'm not so sure how things work out if we're talking about traits (like height, intelligence etc.) that are multi-gene controlled or relate back to clusters of genes interacting with each other. It's like thinking about the Mid-East, my mind starts twisting around on itself when I try to reason it out and I lack crucial blobs of information. And then there's all those unknown unknowns. ==== All of which does not address my original question: If a long lost great uncle hit the lottery and on his death bed offered you all his millions conditioned only on you having a biological child, would you consider a stem child or would you stick with the traditional time tested sister child route?

British and Israeli boffins have just come up with a method to create both sperm and eggs from skin stem cells which means gay couples may soon be able to have their very own biological kids w/o resorting to an outside donor. The article natters on about how this would make having children possible for gay couples. It's not much different in principal from the test tube babes already available to infertile straight couples. Now the boffins in question confine their speculations to making babies for couples but that's just because they're stuffy old scientists concerned about their reputations, IMHO. Well and maybe their grant money. I'm sure clever boys with a sufficiently kinky turn of mind (like those who frequent these threads) immediately realized that there's no particular reason the eggs and sperm couldn't both be derived from the stem cells of a single donor. Yep, you could make your own baby. Mind you the kid would not really be a clone but it would be more closely related than, say, a child you might have with your full sister or even your mother (are you paying attention, AdamSmith?). So...two questions: 1) Can anyone here define the degree of relatedness of a stem child with its father? I can't seem to quite get a handle on this (except it wouldn't be a clone). 2) Would anyone here consider having a stem child (for lack of a better word)? Or is that a little too weird even for our kinkier posters?

And yet here we go again with 'trainers' and new equipment and more bales of hundred dollar bills thinking, "This time will be different." Arrgh! I suspect part of the problem is that our culture just does not give us the mental equipment to deal well with a multi-actor game where every player, state or sub-state, is simultaneously competing and cooperating with every other actor. Just one aspect of the situation: Sure the current bunch in Bagdad wants to defeat Isis and needs the Kurds right now to do so. But it sure as hell doesn't want to see the US build up Kurdistan so much that the Kurds can retain control of the Kirkuk oilfields after the dust settles. And it wants to peel off some of the Sunni tribes from their support of ISIS but can't offer anything that would allow the tribes to wriggle out from under the thumb of the Shias. Meanwhile each of the Sunni tribes has its separate interests, the various Shia militias on which the Bagdad regime is dependant but over which it has only marginal control go their own way, Iran plays its hand to boost both the militias it finances and the Assad dynasty in Syria. Did I forget to mention that the Kurds have ambitions of their own, have their own fractious political divisions and don't really give a hoot about ISIS except as it threatens what they regard as Greater Kurdistan. And while we're at it, don't leave out that ISIS took and now holds its chunk of Iraq only with the help and consent of disgruntled Sunni tribes and the old Bathist network. And that's just the briefest of overviews of Iraq. Syria is even more complicated. And we haven't even talked about the different goals of the 'coalition' that the US has assembled to do the fighting. The reality that any American administration is going to have to deal with is that the more of the heavy lifting the US does on the ground, the more its allies are going to shift their focus to their conflicting end games and jockey for advantages in the aftermath. Why waste resources fighting ISIS if the US will do it for you?

Ah Saul, skeezy lawyer and part time con artist with a weakness for doing the right thing (but only when everything else has failed). How can you not love him? Agree that the first couple of episodes were clunky at times but that disjointedness was down to laying the background for a bunch of potential story arcs in future episodes. Or so I hope.

Well, apparently Walking Dead has had another out gay character at least since just after the prison fiasco. Tara Chambler is a lesbian. I really ought to pay more attention to the back stories of female characters; I swear I had no clue. Wow, how gay can I get?

LOL that's what I thought, RA1, but I didn't trust my old eyes enough to comment.

Car companies prefer to have a manufacturing presence in any market in which they have large sales. That serves as a natural, automatic hedge against currency fluctuations. In the US, almost all of the important foreign owned plants are located in the South, so...not so strange that many southerners drive foreign brands, after all. Further, the Japanese in particular decided in the late '70s to invest heavily in US production facilities to counter intense political pressure on Congress to put up barriers to what seemed then like a never ending flood of Japanese imports. A Tennessee senator with thousands of highly paid Toyota employees building cars in his state was judged more likely to resist protectionist legislation. ==== Loved your pair of gifs, MsAnn.

If escorts worked like on-line games:

LOL something like this? Somebody claimed he waxed his chest.

I watched Downton Abby and Walking Dead. The Oscars weren't even in the running. Not sure if knowing that NPH would appear in his undies would have made any difference. Was he just in shorts or did he keep his tee shirt on? Boxers or tighty whites? Did he show a respectable amount of bulge or was it a replay of Angry Inch? Really, guys, you would think a bunch of gays would know how to give a proper review. Get your act together!

My own speculation would be that the primary concern is getting some prosecutors quality face time on local TV.