1/. Thomas Friedman with a column about the Middle East that's very interesting......but I'm not sure if it's completely true. Or not.
Here I have to say "we report, you decide".....
This article has been updated to include new information about Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meetings with Saudi officials.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — “Your final destination is Tel Aviv?”
I’ve been a reporter in the Middle East since 1979, and those are six words I’d never heard in the place where I was standing about the place where I was going.
I was checking in to fly from Doha, Qatar, to Tel Aviv, via Dubai. It was a once inconceivable connection, and now it tripped off the tongue of the FlyDubai agent at Doha International Airport with the same nonchalance as if she were asking if I was flying to Cairo via Riyadh.
2/. Gavin Newsom sat down with Sean Hannity for an interview, and it was wonderful.
Newsom is articulate, intelligent and doesn't take any BS....surprisingly Hannity wasn't as bad as I thought he would be either.....
This was Part 1, it's 24 minutes and you absolutely should make the time to watch it....and hope, hope he runs with or without Biden's agreement.
And if your brain has been fried with TikTok videos, here is a 2 minute teaser.....
Seriously, watch the full interview above....
3/. Tom Tomorrow and ChatBots.....
4/. You may not realise it yet, but Florida is in deep trouble because of DeSantis's Immigration law that comes into effect July 1st.
According to this story immigrant families are bailing from Florida, and truck drivers will be refusing to deliver to Florida.....
My opinion is this story is a little exaggerated, but who knows....
It’s true folks, it is SO MUCH worse down there than you may think. By signing his latest fascist legislation which criminalizes undocumented immigrants for...well... just being in Florida, De Santis has effectively chased out virtually the entire undocumented poplulation of the state, which means more than 80% of the construction workers, and nearly 100% of the agricultural workers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It cascades from there. I just spent half an hour on tiktok, for an old timer like me that’s a bit of a challenge, but it was worth it. In that short amount of time, I saw latin truckers blocking entire highways with their boycotting and refusing to deliver loads in Florida, or to take loads out. They aren’t even undocumented, that’s just the solidarity folks.
5/. A Florida Republican who voted for the Immigration Bill is asking immigrants to stay, because the bill is only supposed to deter Illegals from moving to Florida.
What an idiot.....
A Florida GOP lawmaker said he still supports a strict anti-immigration law he backed earlier this year — but now fears the new legislation could be causing a "major problem" as migrants flee the state.
"The bill has a lot of negative consequences that I'm trying to mitigate," Florida Rep. Rick Roth told Insider. "The bill has a lot of positive consequences, which I believe was the main purpose of the bill, which is to keep people from moving to Florida that are undocumented. "https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-gop-lawmaker-urges-immigrants-stay-voted-anti-immigration-bill-2023-6
6/. Love it - The PGA/LIV Bonesaw Classic....
7/. The Saudis are investing billions in sportswashing, the PGA/LIV deal
was the most visible so far.....
Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman, two of the key players in the breakaway LIV Golf tour, pictured at the PIF Saudi International in Al Murooj last year. Photograph: Luke Walker/WME IMG/Getty Images Looking back, so much of it was already there on that night in Diriyah when a storm raged across the desert and Anthony Joshua made history – and £60m – by retaining his world heavyweight title belts. Not just the good, the bad and the ugly of Saudi Arabia’s sporting ambitions, but the accommodations of those willing to take the money and look the other way.
One moment from the fight in December 2019 lingers more than most: Joshua absorbing the cheers from the young crowd,
many of whom were women in western clothes, before averting his gaze upwards towards the kingdom’s ruler, Mohammed bin
Salman, and giving a fist-pump to the man who had made it all possible.
8/. This is another must watch - Michigan Senator Mallory McMorrow with a response to a hate filled
fundraiser email from a Republican Senator accusing her of "grooming".....wonderful.
I wish more Democratic politicians had balls like this.....
An update, she is apparently thinking of running for Governor...
9/. Last week's Canadian wildfires and the smoke have focused people on the East Coast on climate change....but will anything happen?
Good question, that Bill McKibben tries to answer....
I’m sitting on a rocking chair just outside the White House fence on Thursday afternoon, and I can more or less make out the seat of American executive power through the haze. In the morning, the local government announced that the air-quality index for the District of Columbia had reached Code Purple (“very unhealthy”), because of the level of particulate pollution, which has never happened before. News came that some outlying areas had stepped up even further to Code Maroon (“hazardous”); Wednesday had been bad in D.C., but was only Code Red (“unhealthy”). (Someone may need to work on the alert color scheme; somehow “maroon” doesn’t quite conjure up the necessary adrenaline.) Basically, you can chew the air; it’s Code Grim.
10/. A very funny Stephen Colbert interview classic with Will Ferrill, who plays a rare animal expert.....
11/. Umair follows up the theme of the wildfires to speculate what is going to happen in just decades.....
It's one of his classic rants, but it doesn't mean he's wrong either.....
I have to warn you, you’re not going to like reading this. Any of this. Go…I don’t know…watch a Marvel Movie or something. Play with a dog. I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen next, and it’s going to be as real and ugly as it gets. You’ve been warned. Ok, ready? Walk right on through the gates of hell with me, Dante, and Virgil. Take a look at planet earth today, and you’ll see something laughable happening, that history will gawp at. When I say look, I mean literally. There’s New York City, covered in a sinister, creepy, gray haze. That haze is literally the smoke and ashes from Canada, (big) parts of which are…on fire.
https://eand.co/the-age-of-the-idiot-versus-the-age-of-extinction-9f47e0b17cff
12/. Hmmmm....Bob Lefsetz gives us a clue why the right wing wants to ban TikTok......they don't accept political ads.....
TikTok doesn’t allow it.
Meanwhile, its social media competitors like Twitter and Facebook have liberalized the restrictive policies they instituted in the wake of falsehoods in the 2020 election cycle and January 6th.
“Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue – In internal forecasts, the company projected that ad sales would keep declining, handing a tough challenge to its new chief executive”: https://tinyurl.com/ycy5x994
Now wait just a second, didn’t Elon Musk tell us Twitter had turned the corner, that advertisers were coming back? Yes, he did, but that turned out to be patently untrue. In other words, if you’re listening to Musk on Twitter you’re bombarded with misinformation, Elon even blocks information contrary to his mission. Ironically, you’ve got to go to mainstream media to get the straight story, but these same people addicted to Twitter and Musk see the mainstream media as the enemy. Credit Donald Trump, he’s vilified most mainstream news outlets, and we know he’s got a large constituency. Furthermore, non-right wing news outlets have been said to be unfairly biased, even though in many cases this is untrue. Bottom line, a lot of people are missing the news. And I mean facts. Like the decline in advertising above.
13/. A strange but very amusing SNL "Whiskers Are We".....love the lesbian overtones......Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon....
14/. Why are groceries getting more expensive? It's the greed of the distributors, not the farmers
who are getting screwed by the system....
Food Fresh is the only grocery store in a rural stretch of southeastern Georgia. It has many five-star Google reviews praising its freshly butchered meats, tomato bar and friendly service. Yet it faces a threat to its survival that no amount of management skill can overcome. Big retailers like Walmart and Kroger “have a handle on suppliers that I can’t touch,” said Food Fresh’s owner, Michael Gay. The chains wrest deep discounts from suppliers, making it impossible for the store to come close to matching the chains’ prices.
To understand why grocery prices are way up, we need to look past the headlines about inflation and reconsider long-held ideas about the benefits of corporate bigness.
16/. Book review - "How To Avoid A Civil War"....looks really interesting and he has a brand new theory why our society is in trouble.....
Illustration: Eiko Ojala/The Guardian n February 2010, Peter Turchin, a relatively obscure researcher at the University of Connecticut, wrote a letter to the distinguished journal Nature. He was responding to their “2020 visions” issue – an upbeat dawn-of-the-decade exercise that collected predictions of progress from across science and politics. Turchin assumed the role of Cassandra. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he wrote, “which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe.” He pointed to waves of disruption that tend to recur every 50 years. “All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.” There was still time to change course, though: with measures to improve wellbeing and reduce economic inequality, “records show that societies can avert disaster”.
17/. Bob Lefsetz reviews a book - "The Guest".....not for everyone's taste....
This is one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. To the point where I constantly had to stop reading it, even though I was enjoying it, it just heightened my anxiety and made me squirm.
But it’s not horror, it’s not a thriller. Ostensibly it’s about the lives of the different classes, but what it’s really about is desperation. Desperate people do desperate things.
You can live your whole life and not know this. Used to be we were all in it together, you interacted, lived with people of different classes. Now, not only do the wealthy live behind gates and fly private, they have a gravy train of education and professional life that keeps them financially secure, but separate. The truth is they’ve got no idea how the rest of the world lives.
https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2023/06/04/the-guest/
18/. Getting withdrawal symptoms from "Succession" ending? Here's a list of similar shows.....
The Righteous Gemstones. Photograph: HBO This past Sunday, TV watchers not drawn in by The Idol’s soft-core glowering may have experienced a pang of absence, suddenly aware of the Succession-shaped hole in their schedule of appointment viewing.
A mourning period follows the conclusion of any series with that degree of buzzy ubiquity and the only way to bust through the doldrums is with a good, satisfying rebound. Below, we’ve rounded up a handful of shows that might fulfill the lingering jones for antics from the Roy gang, organized by the primary dimensions of its appeal.
Today's video - great and quite amusing - "Teamwork"....
Today's traffic joke....
The light turned yellow, just in front of him.
He did the right thing and stopped at the crosswalk, even though he could have beaten the red light by accelerating through the intersection. The tailgating woman behind him was furious and honked her horn, screaming in frustration, as she missed her chance to get through the intersection.
As she was still in mid-rant, she heard a tap on her window and looked up into the face of a very serious police officer.
The officer ordered her to exit her car with her hands up.
He took her to the police station where she was searched, fingerprinted, photographed and placed in a holding cell.
After a couple of hours, a policeman approached the cell and opened the door.
She was escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was waiting with her personal effects.
He said, ''I'm very sorry for this mistake. You see, I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn, giving the guy in front of you the finger and cursing at him.
I noticed the 'What Would Jesus Do' bumper sticker, the 'Choose Life' licence plate holder, the 'Follow Me to Sunday-School' bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk, so naturally ......
I assumed you had stolen the car.
Today's tech joke....
A guy goes into a bar, there's a robot bartender. The robot says, "What will you have?"
The guy says, "Martini."
The robot brings back the best martini ever and says to the man, "What's your IQ?"
The guy says, "168."
The robot then proceeds to talk about physics, space exploration, and medical technology.
The guy leaves, but he is curious. So he goes back into the bar.
The robot bartender says, "What will you have?"
The guy says, "Martini."
Again, the robot makes a great martini, gives it to the man and says, "What's your IQ?"
The guy says, "100."
The robot then starts to talk about NASCAR, Budweiser, and John Deere tractors.
The guy leaves but finds it very interesting, so he thinks he will try it one more time.
He goes back into the bar.
The robot says, "What will you have?"
The guy says, "Martini," and the robot brings him another great martini.
The robot then says, "What's your IQ?"
The guy says, "Uh, about 50."
The robot leans in real close and says,
"Isn’t it terrible the way Biden stole the election?"
Today's Chinese Doctor joke....
A Chinese Doctor can't find a job in a Hospital in the US, so he opens a clinic and puts a sign outside 'GET TREATMENT FOR $20 - IF NOT CURED GET BACK $100.'
An American lawyer thinks this is a great opportunity to earn $100 and goes to the clinic.
Lawyer: "I have lost my sense of taste."
Chinese: "Nurse, bring medicine from box No. 22 and put 3 drops in patient's mouth." Lawyer: "Ugh. this is kerosene."
Chinese: "Congrats, your sense of taste is restored. Give me $20."
The annoyed lawyer goes back after a few days to recover his money.
Lawyer: "I have lost my memory. I cannot remember anything."
Chinese: "Nurse, bring medicine from box no. 22 and put 3 drops in his mouth."
Lawyer (annoyed): "This is kerosene. You gave this to me last time for restoring my taste."
Chinese: "Congrats. You got your memory back. Give me $20."
The fuming lawyer pays him, and then comes back a week later determined to get back $100.
Lawyer: "My eyesight has become very weak I can't see at all."
Chinese: "Well, I don't have any medicine for that, so take this $100."
Lawyer (staring at the note): "But this is $20, not $100!!"
Chinese: "Congrats, your eyesight is restored. Give me $20"
You can't beat Chinese Doctors
Yup....this one is today's true joke!
I mowed the lawn today, and after doing so I sat down and had a cold beer.
The day was really quite beautiful, and the drink facilitated some deep thinking.
My wife walked by and asked me what I was doing, and I said, "Nothing." The reason I said "nothing" instead of saying "just thinking" is because she then would have asked, "About what?
"At that point I would have had to explain that men are deep thinkers about various topics, which would lead to other questions.
Finally I pondered an age old question: Is giving birth more painful than getting kicked in the nuts?
Women always maintain that giving birth is way more painful than a guy getting kicked in the nuts, but how could they know?
Well, after another beer, and some more heavy deductive thinking, I have come up with an answer to that question.
Getting kicked in the nuts is more painful than having a baby, and even though I obviously couldn't really know, here is the reason for my conclusion.
A year or so after giving birth, a woman will often say, "It might be nice to have another child."
On the other hand, you never hear a guy say, "You know, I think I would like another kick in the nuts."
I rest my case.
Time for another beer, and then maybe a nap
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