this ‘masterpiece cafe’ in Tokyo discourages socializing and forbids mobile phones

Ha! Wait 'til neural implants become ubiquitous.

Doesn't matter. That was the deal.

Betts had huge boots to fill immediately after Duane Allman was killed. He did it admirably and with great musical skill. Brothers and Sisters was very good album and really launched the band into something more than a southern rock/blues jam band that primarily appealed to other musicians- in particular, guitarists - and a select sector of blues fans. Betts’ solo album Highway Call (1974) focussed on his Country Swing influences and remains to this day an overlooked gem. Certainly one of my all time favourite albums from the era.

R.I.P.

@Renauda said in RFK Jr. - nope, I won't be the VP candidate:

In this case, blood is certainly not thicker than water.

The Kennedy blood is well known to contain a lot of thinner. You could probably strip paint with it.

My doc has known me since 1977.

He wouldn't even bother to ask.

@Doctor-Phibes said in Nate Silver on Substack:

As much as I might dream of spending election night on a beach in Thailand, there’s no escaping the fact that I’m going to have a lot of my mental bandwidth devoted to the election whether I want to or not.

Give that man a medal. I'm certainly not going to give him $8 a month.

Yeah, that’s the interesting part of these independent journalists on substack. The materials very few are going to be able to offer enough material to justify the subscription rates. I have a subscription to Bari Weiss’ Free Press, but that’s it..:

This is old news from last week.

Let’s open up the NBA D-League (player salaries ~$120K) for female athletes to compete as well and see how that goes.

🍿

The government spent $100MM last year to fund this study about how much Americans threw away in coins last year. They wrote a check for the funding, so that explains why it wasn't counted in the results.

Yes, it changes everything.

What is wrong with this picture.

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@Doctor-Phibes said in Tucker in Moscow:

@Horace said in Tucker in Moscow:

@Doctor-Phibes said in Tucker in Moscow:

Well I for one don’t think he’s ‘good people’ as you put it

I'm able to understand him in non-Manichean terms, and I often appreciate his voice. I get that good vs evil perspectives are important, and my wording triggered that. I don't see any easy, coherent way to consider him to be bought and paid for. He goes off the rails sometimes, but I attribute to stupidity what others may attribute to malice.

Evil’s a strong word, not sure I’d want to go that far. I don’t think he’s trustworthy in any way. His pandering to Trump whilst saying he hates the guy behind closed doors pretty much confirms that. I think Tucker probably cares more about Tucker than anything else.

His texts to a confidante about Trump being a jerk were in the context of Trump claiming a bunch of election fraud, which Tucker trusted he had evidence for, and reported as if the evidence existed. The evidence never materialized, and Tucker got angry. But Tucker will still vote Trump this year.

Yes, I would say so. She needs either a receiver/amp with a phono stage inputs or she needs to buy a separate phono stage that can be connected to the Aux inputs in an home entertainment amp that does not have phono inputs. Decent phono stages are not that expensive. Likewise there are also turntables that plug into a computer to play through either headphones or speakers as well. I would guess hers will do either.

Audiotechnica make good entry and mid range turntables.

@Horace said in Meet the LatinX:

the culture in the government was to encourage females in positions of leadership, to create a balance

I agree with this. One of the things I noticed when I was in china, was that there was a greater % of females in upper level organization positions than pretty much any other country.

(Side note: Dont know if they still do it, but government companies used to require upper management to spend a 1/2 day every month doing manual labor. So for example, in a oil refinery, you might see the refinery manager on a Friday afternoon sweeping up the trash, or doing touch up painting, etc. Not I bad idea I dont think.)

@George-K said in The Two Big Myths about the Middle East:

Myth 2. Palestinians

No state, no nation, no people. Palestine never existed, hence Palestinians never existed, do not exist. Full stop.

Today at the UN
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148731?_gl=1bg71ms_gaMjA2OTM4NTgwLjE3MTM0OTE1MTQ._ga_TK9BQL5X7Z*MTcxMzQ5MTUxMy4xLjEuMTcxMzQ5MTU4Mi4wLjAuMA..

In a vote of 12 in favour to one against, with two abstentions, the Council did not adopt a draft resolution that would have recommended the General Assembly to hold a vote with the broader UN membership to allow Palestine to join as a full UN Member State.

The draft resolution is among the shortest in the Council’s history: “The Security Council, having examined the application of the State of Palestine for admission to the United Nations (S/2011/592), recommends to the General Assembly that the State of Palestine be admitted to membership in the United Nations.”

For a draft resolution to pass, the Council must have at least nine members in favour and none of its permanent members – China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States – using their veto power.

The US voted against it because they said that granting Palestinian full membership would be the same as acknowedging Palestine as a state. Whether or not palestine becomes a state is part of the negotiations between Isreal and Palestine.

I agree with this assessment.

https://www.nba.com/news/jontay-porter-banned-from-nba

The NBA announced today that Jontay Porter, a two-way player recently under contract with the Toronto Raptors, has been banned from the NBA. A league investigation found that Porter violated league rules by disclosing confidential information to sports bettors, limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes, and betting on NBA games.

The league’s investigation found that prior to the Raptors’ March 20 game, Porter disclosed confidential information about his own health status to an individual he knew to be an NBA bettor. Another individual with whom Porter associated and knew to be an NBA bettor subsequently placed an $80,000 parlay proposition bet with an online sports book, to win $1.1 million, wagering that Porter would underperform in the March 20 game.

The league’s investigation also found that Porter limited his own game participation to influence the outcome of one or more bets on his performance in at least one Raptors game. In the March 20 game, Porter played only three minutes, claiming that he felt ill. Due to the unusual betting activity and actions of the player, the $80,000 proposition bet was frozen and was not paid out.

In addition, from January through March 2024, while traveling with the Raptors or Raptors 905, the Raptors’ NBA G League affiliate, Porter placed at least 13 bets on NBA games using an associate’s online betting account. These bets ranged in size from $15 to $22,000, for a total of $54,094. The total payout from these bets was $76,059, resulting in net winnings of $21,965. None of the bets involved any game in which Porter played. Three of the bets were multi-game parlay bets that included one Raptors game, in which Porter bet that the Raptors would lose. All three bets lost.

I was talking to a friend who was telling me that you can now start to bet on things other than the final score - like how many scores one particular person will get, how many XX things will happen in the first period, etc. It will make the gambling problem even worse I think and a lot more pressure on players.

She should probably warn the Indians about the Great Replacement and the dangers of unrestricted immigration.

Those are great pics TG. Yours too George. I gotta thank everyone here who posts from their travels. These are all places I wanted to visit. Everything on IG seems too edited. I appreciate the real stuff.