Good Morning Campers!
Yes, indeed, there is adult content in this ezine. And it may not be of the sexual kind. Nope, this is an ezine for adults, with adult humor, adult topics and adult themes. And like adults, we expect adult behavior and thoughts from our campers. I know. I know. A lot of you are shy and don’t like to draw attention to yourselves. I understand, because I’m kind of a shy, reclusive dragon myself. You have to really draw me out to get me to express my opinion.
Okay, so none of you are buying that line, so let’s just get right to the point.
We’d really, really like to hear your opinions. Not only on whether you liked the issue or not, but on what you read here. The opinions expressed and the thoughts presented.
Let’s hear from you.
Okay, enough about that.
This was sent to me, but it hit me really hard…
When a soldier is killed in the line of duty, his family eventually gets a flag and a note conveying sympathy and respect and from the United States Government. When a Black pro basketball player announces he is a queer, he immediately gets a personal phone call from the President congratulating him for his courage.
Am I missing something?
Did something change that I don’t know about?
Am I alone in not understanding this?
This administration has GOT TO GO!
Okay….that’s enough
I really need to laugh.
World’s Shortest Books
MY BLACK GIRLFRIENDS
By Tiger Woods____________________________________________
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY COUNTRY
By Jane Fonda, Cindy Sheehan
& Michelle Obama
Illustrated by Michael Moore
Foreword by George Soros
________________________________________MY CHRISTIAN ACCOMPLISHMENTS
& HOW I HELPED AFTER KATRINA
By “The Rev Jesse Jackson” & “The Rev Al Sharpton”
______________________________________THINGS I LOVE ABOUT BILL
By Hillary Clinton
_________________Sequel: THINGS I LOVE A BOUT HILLARY
By Bill Clinton
_________________THINGS I CANNOT AFFORD
By Bill Gates
____________________________________THINGS I WOULD NOT DO FOR MONEY
By Dennis Rodman
____ _____________________________
THINGS WE KNOW TO BE TRUE
By Al Gore & John Kerry
_____________________________________
GUIDE TO THE PACIFIC
By Amelia Earhart
____________________________________HOW TO LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST
By Dr. Jack Kevorkian
__________________________________
TO ALL THE MEN WE HAVE LOVED BEFORE
By Ellen de Generes & Rosie O’Donnell
__________________
GUIDE TO DATING ETIQUETTE
By Mike Tyson
__________________________________
THE AMISH PHONE DIRECTORY
_______________________________________
MY PLAN TO FIND THE REAL KILLERS
By O. J. Simpson & Casey Anthony
_________________________________________
HOW TO DRINK & DRIVE SAFELY
By Ted Kennedy
_________
MY BOOK ON MORALS
By Bill Clinton
With introduction by
The Rev. Jesse Jackson
And foreward by
Tiger Woods with John Edwards
____________________________________________________
HOW TO WIN A SUPERBOWL
BY THE MINNESOTA VIKINGS
___________________________________________________
AND, JUST ADDED:
My Complete Knowledge of Military Strategy
By Nancy Pelosi
________________________________________________________
And the shortest book of them all…………………..
THINGS I DID TO DESERVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
By Barack Obama
God addresses Gore first. ”Al, what do you believe in?”
Gore replies: “Well, I believe that I won that election, but that it was your will that I did not serve. And I’ve come to understand that now.”
God thinks for a second and says, “Very good. Come and sit at my left.”
God then addresses Clinton. “Bill, what do you believe in?”
Clinton replies: “I believe in forgiveness. I’ve sinned, but I’ve never held a grudge against my fellow man, and I hope no grudges are held against me.”
God thinks for a second and says, “You are forgiven, my son. Come and sit at my right.”
Then God addresses Obama. “Barrack, what do you believe in?”
Obama replies: “I believe you’re in my chair.”
This is absolutely incredible and beautiful. The Hungarian Shadow Theater Company on Britain’s Got Talent, 2013…do I have to tell you to go to the website if you want to view the videos? I do? Okay. Go to http://dragonlaffs.com to see this and all the videos you get in the mail.
A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: ‘Talking Dog For Sale ‘He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there.
‘You talk?’ he asks.
‘Yep,’ the Lab replies.
After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says ‘So, what’s your story?’
The Lab looks up and says, ‘Well, Idiscovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so… I told the CIA.
In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.’
‘I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running…
But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in.
I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.’
‘I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.’
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
‘Ten dollars,’ the guy says.
‘Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?’
‘Because he’s full of crap! He’s a liar. He’s never been out of the yard’
Q. What Do You Call A Woman Masturbating?
A. A Bushwacker!
Why did Eve bite the forbidden apple?
Because it tasted better than Adam’s banana.
Seems this elderly couple went to the clinic and asked to be tested for HIV.
When the counselor asked why they felt that they should be tested at their age, the old man said, “Well, we heard on TV that people should be tested after annual sex!”
Sex is like snow; you never know how many inches you are going to get or how long it is going to last.
Sex is the price women have to pay for marriage.
Marriage is the price men have to pay for sex.
Steph was telling her boyfriend, Jeff “According to archaeologists, for millions of years the Neanderthal man was not fully erect.”
And Jeff’s reply was, that’s pretty easy to understand considering how ugly the Neanderthal women were!
The secret to life’s happiness is two fold:
1) Have a good sense of humor
2) Have a dirty mind
Please be patient with me.
Even a toilet can only handle one asshole at a time.
Are we there yet?
Father Guido Sarducci was a favorite of mine in the old, original days of Saturday Night Live. Those of you who only know the more recent seasons have no idea WHAT you may have missed. Here’s a little taste. And remember….. http://dragonlaffs.com
The Swiss Guard welcomed the retired Pope Benedict back to Vatican City where he will live. They’ll have two popes in the same living quarters. Not since Neil Simon wrote The Odd Couple has there been a better premise for a Broadway comedy.
You cannot make this “stuff” up: The Air Force’s chief sexual assault prevention officer was arrested over the weekend in Virginia for drunkenly groping a woman.
Singer Lauryn Hill was sentenced today to 3 months in prison and 3 more months in home confinement for failing to pay taxes. Not that she’s getting off so easy for the second half of her sentence, Hill will be confined at home in New Jersey.
Former Senator Jim DeMint says that immigration reform would be blocked if people read the bill. Political experts were confused. Members of Congress can read?
President Obama gave a graduation speech where he told students to reject voices that warn about government tyranny. He then said they could all have their backpacks back after he was done speaking.
The mortician who embalmed Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnev wants help from the White House on what to do with the body. Apparently he is worried about being stiffed with the stiff.
Itty-Bitty
This is a short piece that goes along VERY well with my own “Handling Of A Mad Dog” theory. I think you’ll be able to figure out what the gist is shortly:
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Some will argue this is bad logic… but you are allowed to have your own opinion in Texas.
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This one is from my dad, who just happens to be a retiree from Florida. Thanks Dad.
They look at each other and then go in, thinking this is too good to be true.
The old bartender says in a voice that carries across the room, “Come on in and let me pour one for you!
In no time the bartender serves up four iced martinis shaken, not stirred and says, “That’s 10 cents each, please.”
The four guys stare at the bartender for a moment, then at each other. They can’t believe their good luck. They pay the 40 cents, finish their martinis, and order another round.
Again, four excellent martinis are produced, with the bartender again saying,”That’s 40 cents, please.”
They pay the 40 cents, but their curiosity gets the better of them. They’ve each had two martinis and haven’t even spent a dollar yet.
Finally one of them says, “How can you afford to serve martinis as good as these for a dime apiece?”
“I’m a retired tailor from Phoenix ,” the bartender says, “and I always wanted to own a bar. Last year I hit the Lottery Jackpot for $125 million and decided to open this place. Every drink
costs a dime. Wine, liquor, beer it’s all the same.”
“Wow! That’s some story!” one of the men says.
As the four of them sip at their martinis, they can’t help noticing seven other people at the end of the bar who don’t have any drinks in front of them and haven’t ordered anything the whole time they’ve been there.
Nodding at the seven at the end of the bar, one of the men asks the Bartender, “What’s with them?”
The bartender says, “They’re retired people from Florida . They’re waiting for Happy Hour when drinks are half-price, plus they all have coupons…”
Today’s Last Word is something both astounding and scary as hell. I know we all thought that we would get to this, but George Orwell was right, in more ways than we feared…
FORMER FBI COUNTERTERRORISM AGENT ON CNN:
All Texts, Email and TELEPHONE CALLS are Recorded and Stored by the US Government
Even those made within the USA by American Citizens
EXCUSE ME???!!! Wiretapping is one thing, but are you telling me that all our conversations, text messages, emails, sexting messages (oh dear Lord, NO!) and every other form of electronic communication have been recorded? And can be searched? Not just wiretaps in real time (legal and illegal) but …. but …. how far back does this go? Well, thanks to our good friend Kim Kommando, who pointed us towards The Guardian website (http://www.guardiannews.com/ ) and a piece written by Glenn Greenwald, we will end up getting some, if not all answers to those questions.
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case.
The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.
Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.
On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
“All of that stuff” – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – “is being captured as we speak”.
On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:
Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.
There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained “that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” and that “contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.” But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein’s claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.
That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:
Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.
It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens” (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that “the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.”
Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be “stunned” to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.
Strangely, back in 2002 – when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak – the Pentagon’s attempt to implement what it called the “Total Information Awareness” program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted – without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo – with little controversy or even notice. The weird thing is, that every military base has an Information Awareness Office…strange? Coincidence?
Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:
“‘In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance – and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight – that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,’ [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. ‘Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'”
That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).
Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That’s why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter’s TIA was unveiled.
Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one’s views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.
Scary stuff? You betcha! Think about all the text messages you’ve ever sent, all the emails you’ve sent. Now, think about the fact that the government might want to “talk” to you about a crime, maybe one that you didn’t commit, but maybe you don’t have a good alibi for – do you really want them to be able to go back through ALL your emails, ALL your texts, ALL your phone calls? You don’t think it’s possible they can find some out of context evidence there to hang you for just about anything? I know they could with mine. And I, of course, don’t wish to speak for Lethal, but …
Scary enough for you now?
Here’s another example to go along with your first rant. I didn’t write it, nor do I know who Mike is but I appropriated it from a friend’s fb page.
HUGS,
tzs13
Ol Mike B
No disrespect intended but here we go. Last wk Jason Collins was called a hero for coming out and received a phone call from the president and a tweet from the 1st lady. Charles Ramsey just saved three little girls and Amanda Berry on top of that don’t want any reward money. Someone tell the President to give this man a call and White House tour, I’m going to leave this right here and walk away.
I suggest we all pass around photos of WalMartians and naked pictures of Estelle Getty Roseanne, Oprah, Bea Arthur & those really gross 500# beached whale/Michelin Tire Girl models in thong bikinis from those joke calendars via text messages on our phone.
If Big Brother is going to monitor our private conversations with out our knowledge or permission we can at least make wading thru them as nauseating unpleasant as possible for them in retaliation!