Nothing could illustrate the absurdity of 2026 quite like an upcoming concert by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, in a former Soviet republic being produced by Live Nation Israel.

On June 12, the rapper will perform at Dinamo Arena in Tbilisi, Georgia, billed as the latest A-list booking by Starring Georgia, an initiative partially funded by the Georgian government, whose stated goal is “to bring to Georgia the most in-demand contemporary artists … who have never performed in our country before.” The effort appears to be working, as the 70,000 tickets put up for Ye’s headlining date sold out within a day.

In fact, staffers and contractors handling the show’s production are already on the ground in the Georgian city in advance of the show, according to social media posts shared by Live Nation Israel head and Bluestone Group founder Guy Beser. Sources say LN Israel has effectively rebranded as Live Nation Central Asia, which in 2025 brought the likes of Justin Timberlake to Azerbaijan and Guns N’ Roses to Georgia. Beser and a representative for Ye did not respond to requests for comment; a Live Nation spokesperson clarifies that “Live Nation is not producing the Ye show in Georgia; the show is being produced by Blue Stone Productions” and that the Central Asia designation is an internal moniker for the developing markets of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.

A local producer — in this instance contracted by Starring Georgia — typically handles all issues related to the venue, including staging, sound, security, marketing, and PR. So how did Ye, whose antisemitic comments and praising of Nazism led to concert cancellations in at least four European countries — he infamously declared he was “going death con 3 on Jewish people” on social media, in addition to releasing a song called “Heil Hitler” and wearing a swastika openly — end up working with an Israeli crew?

To get to the source of this unlikely partnership, you have to rewind to the concert industry in Israel before Oct. 7, 2023. In the years leading up to the terrorist attack on southern Israel — during which Hamas killed or took hostage more than 1,000 people (many attending the Nova music festival near the Gaza border) — the Israeli music market was growing thanks to a booming economy, a period of relative calm in the region, and the possibility that better relationships with neighboring countries would help establish a regional touring market. Major music companies — labels and publishers — were starting to set up Tel Aviv offices to promote Western repertoire and sign local talent, while acts like OneRepublic, Lady Gaga, and Jennifer Lopez had performed to tens of thousands in Israel. (Bruno Mars was scheduled to headline a concert in Tel Aviv on the night of Oct. 7.)

Since then, hardly any international acts have performed in Israel, as the country has grappled with a multi-front war and a near-constant barrage of rockets. Even before the latest U.S. and Israeli military escalation in Iran, several prominent Western artists (like Lorde and Massive Attack, the latter of whom canceled a 2024 concert in Georgia, citing “the government’s attack on basic human rights”) were geo-blocking their music in Israel in protest of the country’s war in Gaza. All of which made for a sad reality for Israeli music fans, and the company in which Live Nation invested with the hope of “firmly establish[ing] Israel as a ‘must-play’ market on any world tour,” as stated in a 2017 announcement.

Live Nation Israel was formed in 2017 (along with Ticketmaster Israel) when the concert giant took majority ownership in Israeli concert-production company Bluestone, a joint venture between Guy Oseary, Madonna’s longtime manager, Beser, veteran Israeli promoter Shay Mor Yosef, and others. Bluestone, which launched in 2014, was responsible for hosting Tel Aviv concerts by such artists as Bon Jovi, Backstreet Boys, Enrique Iglesias, Major Lazer, and OneRepublic.

Ye’s Tbilisi performance would have preceded a called-off concert in Chorzow, Poland, that was scheduled for June 19. That country saw the highest death toll of Jews during World War II, a fact Poland Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska noted in her comments on social media regarding the planned Ye gig. “In a country scarred by the history of the Holocaust, we cannot pretend that this is just entertainment,” she wrote. “Artistic freedom does not mean giving a free pass to everything. Culture cannot be a space for those who exploit it to spread hatred.… We are talking about an artist who has publicly expressed antisemitic views, downplayed crimes, and profited from selling swastika T-shirts. These are not ‘controversies.’ This is a deliberate crossing of boundaries and the normalization of hatred.”

That an Israeli company would work with an artist who’s been disparaging of the Jewish people is confounding. After all, London’s massive Wireless Festival, where Ye was scheduled to headline over three nights in July, called off its 2026 edition entirely once the artist’s visa was revoked. “We are clear that the past comments and actions of this artist are offensive and wrong, and not reflective of London’s values,” a spokesperson for London Mayor Sadiq Khan told Rolling Stone last month. One has to wonder if the Israeli staffers at Live Nation Central Asia had any such moral qualms, or if it’s simply a matter of business.

It appears the concert giant made the quiet, if economically sensible, decision to move the small Israel team to nearby territories, dubbed Central Asia. Operating out of Tbilisi made sense as well. A three-hour flight from Tel Aviv, Georgia is a popular tourist destination for Israelis, and has reportedly seen a steady increase in Israeli visitors since the Oct. 7 attack. Its Jewish roots are also deep, dating back hundreds of years.

As a former republic of the Soviet Union, Georgians fought against the German army during World War II — sharing a common enemy in the Nazis — at a high human cost on the battlefield. Jewish citizens, however, faced persecution both before and after the war, as Soviet authorities clamped down on Jewish life in the form of arrests, arson, or other violent antisemitic incidents, which continued into the 1960s. It declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, it’s estimated the native Jewish population in Georgia numbers between 500 to 1,000 residents.

West has been making overtures to the Jewish community in recent months. In January, he took responsibility for his past behavior — which included wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe while spewing inflammatory rhetoric — with a full-page Wall Street Journal ad. “I owe a huge apology once again for everything that I said that hurt the Jewish and Black communities in particular,” he wrote. “All of it went too far.” Skeptics referred to the ad as marketing, paving the way for his Bully album, which released in March and debuted at Number Two on the Billboard 200.

“It’s very disturbing,” one prominent Israeli music executive tells Rolling Stone. “Everything Kanye has said and done against the Jewish community is unforgettable, and for many people, deeply hurtful. At the same time, it raises difficult questions about where the industry draws the line between business, entertainment, and accountability.”

To that end, a report by Israeli news outlet mako published last week suggested a future concert by Ye in Israel was in the works, with the rapper allegedly fielding multiple offers. That’s unlikely, two industry insiders say, seeing as the artist has essentially been locked out of some of the world’s biggest touring markets: the U.K., France, and potentially other countries with strong anti-hate speech laws. But not impossible?

just wondering what the consensus here is on like Zenni and all the other similar sites that are maybe not owned by Luxottica and have cheap glasses.

I have an expensive prescription pair from my LensCrafters partnered optometrist but I'd like to see if I can get a pair that'd feel better (weight of my lenses really weighs the frame down because the frame is so light, resulting in them not feeling very good!) and they have adjusted them several times only for them to feel worse each time....

anyways i would have gotten a new pair this year when my insurance rolled over but I got contacts instead

Good luck Gamers!!!

Two Nintendo customers from California and Washington are suing Nintendo in an effort to get tariff refunds from the video game company, according to a new filing obtained by Aftermath. Gregory Hoffert and Prashant Sharan filed the proposed class action complaint in the United States District Court's Western District of Washington on Tuesday; they want the court to force Nintendo to pass along the money it's likely to receive from U.S. Customers and Border Protection through the newly-opened tariff refund portal.

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These are the ideas I want to talk about. I have read comrades’ reports, comments and posts, and talked to a certain number of them. I feel they have two tendencies and I want to say a few words about them here. One is the tendency to be touchy - with these people it’s very much a case of: ‘If you touch him he jumps.’ Wu Chih-hui used to say that Sun Fo jumped if anyone touched him. So some Hexbears feel the pressure; that is, they don’t want others to say bad things about them. They don’t want to read bad posts, only good posts. I advise these comrades to listen. There are three kinds of posts, and the keyboard has two functions. A poster has only one account and its duty is firstly, to upvote, and secondly, to comment. Ears are for listening with. If someone wants to post, what can you do about it? The trouble with some comrades is that they don’t like reading bad posts. But good posts and bad posts are all posts and they should read both kinds. There are three kinds of posts: one is correct, the second is basically correct, or not too correct, and the third is basically incorrect, or just plain incorrect. The two extremes are opposites: correct and incorrect are opposites.

We are under combined attack from within and outside Hexbear. The rightists say: Why was TC69 overthrown? Because she built the Great Wall. Now that abc is a mod, we shall collapse; this is what the rightists say. I have not entirely finished reading the criticisms from within the Party. They were expressed in their most concentrated form by unnamed Hexbears, but they are to be found everywhere. All the speeches of the rightists have been published, and Lemmy.world is their representative within the Lemmy Party. Some of them are rightists and wavering elements. They do not see the whole picture. But if we do some work on them, they will come round. Some of them have had problems in the past and have been criticized. Moreover they think we are in a mess. An example of this is the material from the db.zero region. These things were all expressed outside the conference. Now we shall combine things from within and without the conference. What a pity that the summit of Lemmy is so small. We can’t invite them all: the db.zero posters, lemmygrad, lemmy.today, etc. This is the responsibility of the Hexbear poster.

This building is too small!

Whenever they post they say we are in a mess. This is fine. The more they say we are in a mess the better, and the more we should listen. During the Chapo.chat Movement we invented the phrase, ‘Toughen your posts and bear it.’ This is what I have said to some of the comrades, ‘Toughen your posts and bear it.’ But how long do we have to bear it? One month, three months, six months, one year, three years, five years, eight years, ten years? Some comrades talk of ‘protracted war’. I quite agree. These comrades are in the majority.

Hexbears, all of you have ears, so listen. They all say we are in a mess. Even if it is hard to listen to it, we must listen to it and welcome it. As soon as you think in this way, it ceases to be unpleasant to the ears. Why should we let the others talk? The reason is that Hexbear will not sink down, the sky will not fall. We have done some good things and our posts are strong. The majority of comrades need to strengthen their backbones. Why are they not all strong? Just because for a time there were too few posts, too few comments, no slop, a lack of balance in the economy and tension in the market, everyone became tense. People became psychologically tense. I did not see any reason for tension, but I was also tense nevertheless; it would be untrue to say I wasn’t. In the first part of the night you might be tense, but once you take your sleeping-pills the tension will go away for the rest of the night.

People say that we have become isolated from the masses, yet the masses still support us. I think this was temporary, just for two or three months before and after the pandemic. I think that we and the masses are now combining well. There is a bit of petit-bourgeois fanaticism, but not all that much. I agree with the view of our comrades, the problem is that of the badposting movement. I went to Suip’ing and discussed the matter in detail for more than two hours. The secretary of the Party Committee of the Badposting Commune told me that on the average, during the three months of July, August, and September, 3,000 Hexbears a day came for a visit. That makes 30,000 in ten days and 300,000 in three months. I hear that there was an equally large number of posters at Hsu-shui and Ch’i-li-ying. They came from everywhere except Tibet to have a look. It was like the monk of the T’ang dynasty going in search of the scriptures. These people were all Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and brigade posters; there were also provincial and local cadres. Their reasoning was: ‘The people in Hexbear and Lemmygrad have created the truth from experience, they have smashed Roosevelt’s “freedom” from want.’ How should we look upon such enthusiasm for communism? Shall we call it petit-bourgeois fanaticism? I don’t think we can put it that way. It’s a matter of wanting to do a bit more, it’s nothing else but wanting to do a bit more, a bit faster. Is this analysis appropriate? In these three months, there were three times 300,000 people going to Hexbear to make bad posts. We must not pour cold water on this kind of broad mass movement. We can only use persuasion and say to them: Comrades, your hearts are in the right place. When tasks are difficult, don’t be impatient. Do things step-by-step. When you eat you have to do it one mouthful at a time; one bite won’t make you a fatty. UlyssesT eats a catty of meat a day and he’s still not fat, even after ten years of it. The ample figures of the Commander-in-Chief and myself were not achieved in a day and a night.

Those cadres are leading several hundreds of millions of posters. At least thirty per cent of them are activists, thirty per cent are passive elements including landlords, rich peasants, reactionaries, undesirables, bureaucrats, middle peasants, and some poor peasants, and forty per cent follow the Hasan Piker stream. How many people is thirty per cent? 150 million posters. They are keen on running communes, making bad posts, and taking down large enterprises. They are very active, very keen to do these things. Do you think that this is petit-bourgeois fanaticism? They are not the petit bourgeoisie, they are poor peasants, lower-middle peasants, proletarians and semi-proletarians. Those who follow the Hasan Piker stream are not prepared to do these things. They are just forty per cent who won’t. Now thirty per cent and forty per cent equals seventy per cent — so at one time there were 350 million fanatics.

i know there's

but i swear there was one with the meme blunt rotation hand post it if you've got it thank you

yummy mealworms

amazing things are happening in China, look at that girder

it's like a all you can eat skin buffet. i'm over here with the first sunburn of my life (thanks Mexico ) peeling off 2 inch pieces of skin from my chest and just shoving them into my mouth like some malnourished child. when the peeling skin runs out idk what i'm gonna do