Lucky

That's pretty dirty pool, RockHard. You can find plenty to criticize the man for, but starting in on his personal appearance just isn't fair. Many of us are either not so pretty or not so pretty anymore. Stick to the issues.

Let's face it, guys. We were there because it was an interesting place to interact with like-minded guys. Somehow we got on the bad site of the admins, and don't discount deej, who I think is a truly horrible person, and found ourselves banished. Many who do get banned/suspended come over here, then when they can go back to the other site, they run as fast as they can to get there. That's why I credit Adam Smith, who didn't pursue that path and refused the offer of help from others to get him back in the good graces there. My own banishment followed an effort by Daddy to get me to come back after a previous one. It was a setup as apparently, or so I think, deej wanted to ban me. He proceeded to do so on the slimmest evidence. I won't go back again.

"Years ago" Spartacus was on Starz. It's not that popular a site, compared to Netflix. So anyone who did not subscribe to Starz is now having the opportunity to see the show. Netflix has made it a bigger success. It's hardly "over."

Huffpost takes an in-depth look at Brazil's president: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bolsonaro-brazil-authoritarian-far-right_n_5e0a3afdc5b6b5a713b24bce

I am very late to the Spartacus series, which started on Starz and is now on Netflix. I thought the guy playing Spartacus was really good and very hot. Why isn't he the sexiest man alive? I got to the end of Season 1 and was so happy with an episode I started googling the show. Shock ensued as I learned that actor Andy Whitfield cannot be the sexiest man alive because he isn't...alive. He died of a sudden leukemia after the first season. Here he has his biggest role yet and this hits him. I have yet to see his successor, Liam McIntyre. There is nothing about the show at the other site or here. Given the nudity and eroticism of those loin-clothed gladiators, I would have thought it would be talked about. It's a good show!

The underlying assumption of Euroman's posts seems to be that escorting is unsavory- something one would never do unless desperate. Is it okay to buy gum from someone selling it because he is desperate for the money? Granted, sex work is more personal, but unless the worker is a slave to a pimp or a trafficker, then it's his choice. Europeanman, have a great time in Thailand!

Today I filled out the census forms, it does go on and on. There was concern that by asking citizenship questions it would deter immigrants who are not citizens from participating, thus leaving them undercounted. I always thought that the census was to count the number of people in the country, out of which political seats would be issued. But if hordes of immigrants do not respond, they lose representation. The census should focus on building trust and not statistics that don't help determine the population. This census often feels like an IRS form as they ask very detailed income questions. I don't know why. The questions and suggested answers are not always consistent. Did you work at least one hour? Then tell us the annual income! I wish they would just stop at counting the population, but that won't happen. They even want to know if you have a smartphone, computer, laptop, and Ipad. Then they ask how you connect to the internet. Are those really census questions? How about these suggested (by me) questions? Do you rim? Men and/or women? How deep does your tongue go? I don't trust the Trump government to keep the data separate as promised. I think that they will use it in any way that suits them. It's a $100 fine to not respond or skip questions. First though they send mailers, then a person to your house, probably wearing a MAGA hat. What has your experience been?

Are we being scammed here? Saw this just now! WilliamM Regent · From Pennsylvania Last seen Viewing thread Bromance or something else...? · 15 minutes ago

Surprised to read the specific exclusion of "sexual orientation" from the anti-discrimination guidelines for the Interior Department. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sexual-orientation-interior-department-ethics-guidelines_n_5dff99e3e4b0b2520d0ca480

Now that I am infused with the Christmas spirit, I feel bad for picking on Ben. He's a good guy and I am sure he feels that the donation requests are appropriate.

I really liked The Inheritance. Part one is the best if you can only see one part, but the whole play is something to enjoy.

But wait! There's more! https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ny-jair-bolsonaro-brazil-president-homosexual-face-journalist-20191224-tu3x4h7o7zgzzn3rqrhvtm7hdy-story.html

I checked out the other site too. I hadn't realized that Benjamin Nicholas had his lips so deep inside daddys ass. He's telling everyone- repeatedly!- to donate. Sort of a self-appointed daddy dick.

+1

DT has nothing to do with this one. We've been rushing to give up our privacy to any website that asks!

The Christmas gift from the media seems to be an expose of how our privacy rights are being violated in almost everything we do, and everywhere we go. The NY Times has one article, the first in a series: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html?action=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage The Washington Post tells us how our cars spy on us. Every transgression is noted : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/17/what-does-your-car-know-about-you-we-hacked-chevy-find-out/ I once had Verizon's HUM installed on my car. They let me see the data collected. If I sped, it was noted, if I braked hard, it was noted. Nothing I did escaped notice, so I canceled it rather than give a ride to spies. Yet the Post article says I don't stand a chance!

He's at it again! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/20/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-homophobic-outburst-corruption-scandal

You resurrected an old thread just to post that picture? Even I had forgotten this thread!

So true in 2018, but not this year.

With the Senate poised to laugh at the House's impeachment case, they will create a situation where Trump will be accountable to no one. It will be much better for him than killing someone on Fifth Avenue. Our system of government provides checks and balances with its three tiers. The Supreme Court will cast the final vote, and it is hard to believe that a majority would act to stop Trump's rise. He can snub the Congress and the Constitution. Wait until his term is up and he refuses to leave. Will Mitch McConnell grow a pair then, or will it be too late?

When I went, years ago, the guy at the front desk was the coke dealer. He did a good business. Clients would mostly buy through their garoto.

I snagged a good coach fare ($520) last July for travel last month. By the time the dates arrived I had lost interest in a lengthy coach trip to Asia. I don't know that I will ever choose coach again for Bangkok. I have a lot of miles on Lifemiles.com, but business class tickets are so scarce as to be impossible. When you do find one, it makes too many stops.

Adam Driver is all over the entertainment news. I saw him last week in The Report, and I saw him last night in Marriage Story on Netflix. The movie received six Golden Globe nominations yesterday, including Best Actor for Adam Driver. The movie is certainly well done. Scarlett Johansson plays the wife, Laura Dern plays her lawyer. My review says that the women in this movie are awfully harsh on the men. Driver can't win when they gang up on him. Dern, in particular, plays a ball-cutting divorce lawyer. Ultimately, the movie was just depressing. If two well-intended people cannot make a go of marriage, what's that leave for others not so committed? Relationships are hard, but are they impossible in today's society? Yes, of course, I know of people with lengthy and satisfying relationships, but...it seems like the younger generation is having a harder time.

Currently former CIA Director John Brennan is getting some accolades for standing up to Donald Trump. Well, if you watch the ADAM Driver movie The Report on Amazon Prime, you will learn that Brennan is a disgusting liar who tried to cover up all of the torture done by the CIA under Cheney. That's my takeaway from this powerful movie. I'll let a professional reviewer tell you about the movie cuz he can do it much better than I can: From Variety: The Report Director: Scott Z. Burns With: Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Ted Levine, Maura Tierney, Michael C. Hall. Release Date: Jan 26, 2019 Official Site: https://www.sundance.org/projects/the-report Let’s talk, for a moment, about the political thrillers of the 1970s — not just the reality and urgency that coursed through them, but the history-written-with-lightning feeling they gave you. In a galvanizing work of art like “All the President’s Men,” or even a topically charged entertainment like “Three Days of the Condor,” it was the hunt for truth, the moment-to-moment investigative fervor of it, that was always so addictive and engrossing. In those movies, morality and drama became one. “The Report,” written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, is a true-life drama about relatively recent events in Washington, D.C., that carries that same rapt, tense, electric, slice-to-the-bone-of-what’s-happening sensation. It’s the sort of movie that Hollywood once made and now, for the most part, comes up with only rarely; maybe now we have to go to Sundance to see it. But even here, “The Report” is a bit of an anomaly: a large-scale saga of corruption, justice, and overwhelming relevance that’s at once gripping and eye-opening, even if you’re the sort of news junkie who thinks they already know the story. As the title comes on screen, it says “The Torture Report,” and then the word “torture” gets blocked out, as if it were being redacted. The movie goes on to tell the true story of Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), a staff member of the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence who in 2009, while working for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), gets charged with heading up a Senate investigative report into the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” during the aftermath of 9/11. The impetus for creating the report is the revelation that the Agency has destroyed hundreds of hours of tapes of those same interrogations. What, exactly, went on in them? Jones spent five years and combed through 6.3 million pages of documents to get the answer. How do you make an exciting movie out of this? Burns, a veteran screenwriter (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) and producer (“An Inconvenient Truth”), has never directed a major feature before, and he doesn’t try to gussy up the events by spoon-feeding us a lot of melodramatic cereal. “The Report” is as steeped in information and wonkish detail as a deep-dive work of journalism. It lets the facts, and our apprehension of what they mean, tell the story. That’s a tricky thing to bring off, but Burns, by trusting the audience, has created a darkly authentic political thriller that does exactly what a movie like this one should do. It leaves you chastened and inspired. Driver, in jackets and ties and a squared-off haircut that give him the look of a bureaucratic D.C. lifer, plays Jones as a man consumed, at the expense of everything else, by his mission: to learn what the CIA did and why. He and his small staff are given a basement office that’s like a fluorescent concrete tomb with obsidian computer screens. As he looks at what happened to each of the key Middle Eastern figures who was captured and detained after 9/11 (there were, in the end, a total of 119), the film flashes back to extended sequences that show us how the enhanced interrogation techniques program evolved and what it really looked like. We’ve seen bits of this in movies before, such as “Zero Dark Thirty,” which implied that shutting someone up in a box rendered him more cooperative. Burns sticks closer to the real record: that when prisoners were subjected to practices that edged over the line of what the Geneva Convention allows, they didn’t give up vital information — they fell into states of agonized delirium and said nothing, or spouted nonsense, or revealed old contacts. In “The Report,” we see the prisoners squirreled away at black sites, in unnamed countries, in dungeons with tunnels, getting slammed against walls or “short-shackled” to the floor, with death metal blasting, or being waterboarded, a process that was said to be uncomfortable yet “safe” — but, in fact, was not without its hazards. The man heading up the interrogations, Dr. Jim Mitchell (Douglas Hodge), is a psychologist with a private contracting company who is given a budget of $80 million to grind the truth out of the prisoners. Yet he has never conducted an interrogation before (yes, this all really happened), and he operates under the basic intuitive sadistic assumption that ruled these practices: the more pain, the more gain. When Mitchell and his associate waterboard somebody and ask, “Where’s the next attack?,” it’s as if they seriously believe that there truly is one in the works, and that the prisoner knows it, and that he’s going to give it up. But as Jones scrutinizes one case after another, he’s confronted not just by the horror of what went on, but by the staggering ineffectiveness of it. None of the prisoners reveals anything. Ever. Yet that’s not how the CIA spins it. In truth, the things that were learned during that time — like the revelation of who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, was, or the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden — all came from connecting dots of information that the CIA already had in its possession. The enhanced interrogation techniques trashed international law and gave the U.S. nothing. And, of course, became the ultimate recruiting tool for radical Islam. You may say, “Sure, I knew all this already.” But it’s not as if Watergate was news the first time (or the 10th) you ever watched “All the President’s Men.” “The Report” burrows into the palace intrigue of how the realities of American torture were covered up, and of what was going on in the minds of the people who were doing this stuff. President Bush, as the film makes explicit, was kept out of the loop; it was Vice President Dick Cheney who gave the approval. And what “The Report” shows us is that the torture, even though it wasn’t working, gratified something in the psyche of the men (and, on occasion, the women) who operated the American security machine. Whether or not it worked, it was on some level payback, a primitive signifier of war. Adam Driver, who is such a fine actor, keeps finding new things to surprise us with, changing up his persona in ways that feel entirely organic. In “The Report,” he speaks in rapid fire, with concentrated purpose and intensity, and he’s tasked with the challenge of delivering great big heady chunks of dialogue that are there to lure us into the action on an expository level — i.e., he keeps telling the audience what’s going on. Yet the fiercely contained force of Driver’s performance is that he makes this ongoing factual download a vital part of the character. Washington is the ultimate town that runs on information, and for Jones, the complicated question of what the CIA did, and knew, becomes an issue of obsession. He’s explaining it to us and to himself. About halfway through the movie, he gets ready to deliver his report (which ran, in its original form, to nearly 7,000 pages), and that’s when he runs up against the roadblock that was always lurking: the CIA plans to kill it. Even after President Obama is elected and uses the T-word (“torture”) in his first few days of office, he wants to get the issue behind him. But Jones, though he’s at the nexus of U.S. government power, realizes that he’s been appointed, in effect, to be a whistleblower. He’s like a one-man Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he pushes back against any attempt to bury the report. He ends up with a target on his back. Staging recent history, and making it convincing, isn’t easy. But Scott Z. Burns brings it all off with supreme confidence. He leaps from Senate hearings to back-room meetings with the threatening new head of the CIA, John Brennan (Ted Levine), to Jones’s Deep Throat-like encounters with a CIA medical officer (Tim Blake Nelson) and the New York Times national security reporter. Jones is also forced to take a meeting with a high-priced lawyer (Corey Stoll) when it looks like he may face criminal charges for leaking a classified document: the CIA’s own report on enhanced interrogation techniques, overseen by Leon Panetta, which came to the same conclusion that Jones’ report did. The CIA knew torture wasn’t working, but couldn’t admit it because it would damage the Agency’s credibility. The average political drama would look at a reality like that and tut-tut its disapproval. But part of the seductive intelligence of “The Report” is that Burns, as a filmmaker, wants to understand as much as he wants to wave a moral flag. His film isn’t a liberal-left harangue. It unfolds in the world of realpolitik, where a man like Daniel Jones operates out of a purity that the country needs but, at the same time, can’t always afford. (There’s a dryly funny phone call between Sen. Feinstein and President Obama, in which Obama’s curt refusal to make heads roll is basically his way of paying the CIA back for killing Osama bin Laden, and therefore aiding his re-election.) Nowhere is the balance of idealism and practicality, valor and hard-headedness, more exquisitely embodied than in Annette Bening’s superb performance as Dianne Feinstein. From her beauty-shop hair to her iron-lady gaze to her voice of delicate will, Bening is note-perfect. But she also makes Feinstein a ticklish study in how power works, at its best, in Washington — as a game of survival that filters the right thing to do through the art of the possible. “The Report” is a galvanizing movie that, if handled correctly, many people will want to see, because by the time it’s over the movie feels like something this country needs now more than ever: a reckoning.

Can Pete Win? The latest: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/opinion/pete-buttigieg-polls.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage