When you guys are done mourning the fraternity house that got closed for bullying, hazing, and hatred perhaps you should move on to how to clean it up.
I'm not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. Yet I have been bullied for my beliefs. It's somehow ironic that the person that has maintained the message-forum since the turn of the century is one of the victims.
HooBoy wanted a Gentlemen's club. If we can not represent diversity and all of the different aspects of the LGTB community then why should we bother?
We have a real enemies that are driving a lot of hate. We need to be united if we want to keep the rights that so many have battled for over the last 50 years.
It's time to start working on the action plan that combats the problems Tulsi Gabbard talked about in her Dawali message in the first post. If this doesn't happen the PR&W forum will just silently slip away.
The Grinch is showing up early this year. If you're not a part of the solution, then you're a part of the problem. If you misbehave, you'll be timed out until next year.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
Your Children’s Yellowstone Will Be Radically Different
Written by Marguerite Holloway. Photographs and time-lapse video by Josh Haner.
NOV. 15, 2018
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — On a recent fall afternoon in the Lamar Valley, visitors watched a wolf pack lope along a thinly forested riverbank, ten or so black and gray figures shadowy against the snow. A little further along the road, a herd of bison swung their great heads as they rooted for food in the sagebrush steppe, their deep rumbles clear in the quiet, cold air.
In the United States, Yellowstone National Park is the only place bison and wolves can be seen in great numbers. Because of the park, these animals survive. Yellowstone was crucial to bringing back bison, reintroducing gray wolves, and restoring trumpeter swans, elk, and grizzly bears — all five species driven toward extinction found refuge here.
But the Yellowstone of charismatic megafauna and of stunning geysers that four million visitors a year travel to see is changing before the eyes of those who know it best. Researchers who have spent years studying, managing, and exploring its roughly 3,400 square miles say that soon the landscape may look dramatically different.
Over the next few decades of climate change, the country’s first national park will quite likely see increased fire, less forest, expanding grasslands, shallower, warmer waterways, and more invasive plants — all of which may alter how, and how many, animals move through the landscape. Ecosystems are always in flux, but climate change is transforming habitats so quickly that many plants and animals may not be able to adapt well or at all.
At the northeast entrance, for example, about 60 fewer days fall below freezing than did 30 years ago.
The snow that blankets the park each winter is a vital part of the Yellowstone ecosystem.
But the snow often doesn’t stay as long, or accumulate the way it used to.
By mid-century, scientists predict that the snowpack in some areas of the park will decrease sharply.
Colors show projected decrease in snowpack compared to current averages.
Inches of water trapped as snow
Because snow is a cornerstone of the park’s ecology, the decline is alarming to some ecologists.
Summers in the park have become warmer, drier and increasingly prone to fire. Even if rainfall increases in the future, it will evaporate more quickly, said Michael Tercek, an ecologist who has worked in Yellowstone for 28 years.
“By the time my daughter is an old woman, the climate will be as different for her as the last ice age seems to us,” Dr. Tercek said.
Yellowstone’s unusual landscape — of snow and steam, of cold streams and hot springs — is volcanic. Magma gives rise to boiling water and multihued thermophiles, bacteria that thrive at high temperatures.
For many visitors, Yellowstone represents American wilderness: a place with big, open skies where antelope and bison still roam.
“You run into visitors and they thank you for the place,” said Ann Rodman, a park scientist. “They are seeing elk and antelope for the first time in their lives.”
Ms. Rodman, who has been working in Yellowstone for 30 years, has pored over temperature and weather data. The trends surprised her, as well as the urgency.
“When I first started doing it, I really thought climate change was something that was going to happen to us in the future,” she said. “But it is one of those things where the more you study it, the more you realize how much is changing and how fast.”
“Then you begin to go through this stage, I don’t know if it is like the stages of grief,” Ms. Rodman said. “All of a sudden it hits you that this is a really, really big deal and we aren’t really talking about it and we aren’t really thinking about it.”
Ms. Rodman has seen vast changes near the town of Gardiner, Mont., at the north entrance to Yellowstone. Some non-nutritious invasive plants like cheatgrass and desert madwort have replaced nutritious native plants. Those changes worry Ms. Rodman and others: Give invasives an inch and they take miles.
Cheatgrass has already spread into the Lamar Valley. “This is what we don’t want — to turn into what it looks like in Gardiner,” Ms. Rodman said. “The seeds come in on people’s cars and on people’s boots.”
If cheatgrass and its ilk spread, bison and elk could be affected. Cheatgrass, for instance, grows quickly in the spring. “It can suck the moisture out of the ground early,” Ms. Rodman said. “Then it is gone, so it doesn’t sustain animals throughout the summer the way native grasses would.”
In recent years, elk have lost forage when drier, hotter summers have shortened what ecologists call the green wave, in which plants become green at different times at different elevations, said Andrew J. Hansen of Montana State University.
Some elk now stay in valleys outside the park, nibbling lawns and alfalfa fields, Dr. Hansen said. And where they go, wolves follow. “It is a very interesting mix of land-use change and climate change, possibly leading to quite dramatic shifts in migration and to thousands of elk on private land,” he said.
Drier summers also mean that fires are a greater threat. The conditions that gave rise to the fires of 1988, when a third of the park burned, could become common.
By the end of the century, “the weather like the summer of ’88 will likely be there all the time rather than being the very rare exception,” said Monica G. Turner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “As the climate is warming, we are getting fires that are happening more often. We are starting to have the young forests burn again before they have had a chance to recover.”
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In 2016, a wildfire swept through trees in a section near the Madison River that had burned in 1988. Because young trees don’t have many cones on them, Dr. Turner said, they don’t have as many seeds to release to form new forest. The cones they do have are close to the ground, which means they are less likely to survive the heat.
Repeated fires could lead to more grassland. “The structure of the forests is going to change,” Dr. Turner said. “They might become sparse or not recover if we keep doing a double and triple whammy.”
In 2016, the Yellowstone River — famous for its fly fishing and its cutthroat trout, which thrive in colder waters — was closed to anglers for 183 miles downstream from the park after an outbreak of kidney disease killed thousands of fish. “The feeling was that this was a canary in the coal mine,” said Dan Vermillion of Sweetwater Travel Company, a fly-fishing operation in Livingston, Mont.
Lower flows and warmer water are one consequence of spring arriving earlier. Quickly melting snow unleashing torrents is another. Flooding has affected the nesting of water birds like common loons, American white pelicans, and double-crested cormorants. “All their nesting is on lakes and ponds, and water levels are fluctuating wildly, as it does with climate change,” said Douglas W. Smith, a park biologist.
And Yellowstone’s trumpeter swans are declining. By the early 20th century, hunters had wiped out most of the enormous birds in the continental United States, killing them for food and fashionable feathers. But 70 or so swans remained in the Yellowstone region, some of them safe inside the park. Those birds helped restore trumpeters nationwide. Now only two trumpeter pairs live in the park, and they have not bred successfully for several years.
Part of the reason, said Dr. Smith and a colleague, Lauren E. Walker, may be the loss of nests and nesting sites during spring floods. A pair on Swan Lake, just south of Mammoth Hot Springs, has spurned the floating nest that the Park Service installed to help the birds.
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“Heritage-wise this is a really important population,” Dr. Walker said. “If this is no longer a reliable spot, what does that mean for the places that may have more human disturbance?”
On the shores of Yellowstone Lake, dozens of late-season visitors watched two grizzly bears eating a carcass, while a coyote and some ravens circled, just a hundred or so yards from the road. “If they run this way,” the ranger called out, “get in your cars.”
Grizzlies are omnivores, eating whatever is available, including the fat- and protein-packed nuts of the whitebark pine. That pine is perhaps the species most visibly affected by climate change in Yellowstone and throughout the West. Warmer temperatures have allowed a native pest, the mountain pine beetle, to better survive winter, move into high elevations and have a longer reproductive season. In the last 30 years, an estimated 80 percent of the whitebark pines in the park have died by fire, beetle, or fungal infection.
A grizzly bear in Yellowstone.
When pine nuts are not plentiful, bears consume other foods, including the elk or deer innards left by hunters outside the park. And that can bring the Yellowstone-area grizzlies, relisted as endangered this September, into conflict with people.
Yellowstone provides a refuge for people seeking and delighting in a sense of wilderness. It offers a landscape unlike any other: a largely intact ecosystem rich in wildlife and rich in geothermal features. Yellowstone’s unusual beauty was forged by volcanic heat; heat from humanity could be its undoing.
It seems that several of the posters in that forum didn't take heed of the multiple warnings about attacking other members of the message forum. Any discussion in this thread must remain on topic and conducted in a civil manner. Violators will be ejected.
The object is to update the Terms & Rules or create a manifest that specified the guidelines that are acceptable to the management.
I guess I am one of the few who enjoys kale. I particularly like them in soups. I also like to juice them. Add some oranges yum. I recent went to Austin and there is a place that had kale and durian smoothy. I found it quite good.
I put “I recommend you shower before I arrive to the appointment, or wait until I arrive to shower with me. A nice warm shower helps open pores for the massage oil and bring up your body temperature for a more relaxing experience”
Both websites are hosted outside of the US. None of the variants (there are several - look at the website) list prices when logged in from the US nor are prices listed when using a VPN.
As you can see from the following side-by-side comparison, both sites allow the reviewer to enter text and neither site publishes it when a user views from the US. If you view a review on rent.men from outside of the US or from within the US while using a VPN from outside of the US you will see the review text.
I’ve stumbled across a few forum topics discussing best destinations for escorts to travel but I find the topic to be very general as one provider’s trash (city) may be another’s treasure, simply because of the demographic and what that demographic is seeking. The most helpful but slightly outdated info I found was an infographic produced by Pornhub a few years back detailing biggest porn search results and where. I’d love for providers to share their niche, aesthetic and where they feel these attributes warrant the most success.
i cant believe how grown adult men get caught up constantly thinking (or hoping) that a very attractive male escort will become best of friends or better yet, having the notion that the said hooker will hopelessly fall in love with the old guzzard and live happily ever after. its unbelievable to me.
this is a business transaction. not a bad thing at all. keep it that way and no one gets emotionally hurt.
case in point. there is a newer dancer at one of the clubs where i live. big muscle guy. handsome but after chatting with him a few times can tell he is somewhat of a wild guy. not bad just young with that sort of energy that when not focused can be dangerous. i chat with him and give him a few bucks now and then yet he seems to always say or do something that is off putting to me. so i go a few weeks ignoring him and it drives him nuts. well last night he comes up to me and asks how i am. i told him i have been having some health issues lately. he looks at me and says "lets talk about it when i get done with my next set in 30 minutes". ok i thought. the nice side comes out. so i eventually go over to give him a few bucks while on the box dancing as a nice gesture to his kind words. first thing out of his mouth when he bends over is "yeah..i knew you couldnt stay away from all this hotness for long". he wasnt saying it with any kind of brevity. more like a "i got you you fag...no one can stay away from this hot straight guy" type of talk. fine in the bedroom but not at all appropriate where it was being said. i was putting my second dollar in his g string when he said this. right at that moment i not only stopped putting the second dollar in there, i took the first one out. i looked up at him and said " the smile is nice, work on the muscles getting harder and the big mouth has to go for sure".
guys...you have to always remember... these guys have what you WANT but more importantly we have what they NEED. keep this in mind and you will have very little problems.
Did @MikeSinz piss in your cereal or something? The only person who comes off as “deranged” in this conversation is the one launching unnecessary personal attacks. Hint: it’s you. Go find something better to do with your time. Your opinions about Mike’s tattoos could literally not be any less relevant to this conversation.
Populist Fury got a reaction from Youngmilkman in Mega Millions Jackpot at $1,600,000,000
