Spotify was never going to drop Joe Rogan because his long form podcast is the strategic lynchpin for making Spotify profitable. Spotify's 6 year history shows it can't profit from music streaming alone, but that in order to achieve profitability, it needs to book advertising revenue, and THAT's what the podcasting content is for.
Spotify is scheduled to announce its Q4 results this Wednesday. In the interim, the musically and popularly irrelevant Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Nils Lofgren have cost Spotify billions in market value through their virtue signaling shenanigans. Kudos to the shrewd manipulators who pulled this charade off and managed to capitalize on the short term decline in Spotify market valuation.
Spotify's shares have subsequently dropped by 6% in just three days, from January 26 to January 28 (via Variety), following Young's protest. Spotify has not been having the greatest of times even before the loss
this controversy caused. Its stock price had already dropped earlier
this month, as the company reported a 25% fall in share value on January
25, a day before this all started.
Despite that, the popular
streaming service stated that it had already removed over 20,000 podcast
episodes related to the pandemic since its start.
greenwald |The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove
Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet
of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban
anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really
galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, with too large of an audience of young people,
for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up.
Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line
were abject failures. Shortly after The Wall Street Journal reportedin
September, 2020 that Spotify employees were organizing to demand that
some of Rogan's shows be removed from the platform, Rogan invited Alex Jones onto his show: a rather strong statement that he was unwilling to obey decrees about who he could interview or what he could say.
On Tuesday, musician Neil Young demanded
that Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring
Young's music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotify predictably sided
with Rogan, their most popular podcaster in whose show they invested
$100 million, by removing Young's music and keeping Rogan. The pressure
on Spotify mildly intensified on Friday when singer Joni Mitchell issued a similar demand. Allsortsofcensorship-madliberalscelebrated this effort to remove Rogan, then vowed to cancel their Spotify subscription in protest of Spotify's refusal to capitulate for now; a hashtagurging the deletion of Spotify's app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history's largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.
Obviously,
Spotify is not going to jettison one of their biggest audience draws
over a couple of faded septuagenarians from the 1960s. But if a current
major star follows suit, it is not difficult to imagine a snowball
effect. The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient
platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it
with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the
parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it.
“Prince Harry was under pressure to cut ties with Spotify yesterday
after the streaming giant was accused of promoting anti-vax content,” claimedThe Daily Mail which, reliable or otherwise, is a certain sign of things to come.
One
could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no
longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young
and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring
pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify. With the stock price of
Spotify declining as these recent controversies around Rogan unfolded, a
strategy in which Spotify is forced to choose between keeping Rogan or
losing substantial musical star power could be more viable than it
currently seems. “Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week
after rock icon Neil Young
called out the company for allowing comedian Joe Rogan to use its
service to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his popular
podcast, 'The Joe Rogan Experience,’” is how The San Francisco Chronicle put it
(that Spotify's stock price dropped rather precipitously
contemporaneously with this controversy is clear; less so is the causal
connection, though it seems unlikely to be entire coincidental):
hollywoodreporter | Nils Lofgren, a longtime guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is among the musicians to pull music from Spotify in the wake of the streaming platform spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
He follows Neil Young, who announced Wednesday that he would remove his catalogue in protest of COVID vaccine misinformation being spread on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Joni Mitchell, who followed in solidarity soon after.
Both musicians referred to an open letter sent to Spotify from 270
professionals in the scientific and medical communities, calling on the
streaming service to address misinformation distributed on the platform.
In a statement shared to the Neil Young Archives
on Saturday, Lofgren shared: “A few days ago, my wife and I became
aware of Neil and Daryl [Hannah] standing with hundreds of health care
professionals, scientists, doctors and nurses in calling out Spotify for
promoting lies and misinformation that are hurting and killing people.”
Lofgren noted that 27 years of his music has been taken off the
service and that he is also reaching out to labels that own his earlier
music to have that removed as well. The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Spotify for comment.
“Neil and I go back 53 years,” Lofgren’s statement continued. “Amy
and I are honored and blessed to call Neil and Daryl friends, and knew
standing with them was the right choice.”
taibbi | Censors have a fantasy that if they get rid of all the Berensons and
Mercolas and Malones, and rein in people like Joe Rogan, that all the
holdouts will suddenly rush to get vaccinated. The opposite is true. If
you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher levels
of suspicion. They will now be sure there’s something wrong
with the vaccine. If you want to convince audiences, you have to allow
everyone to talk, even the ones you disagree with. You have to make a
better case. The Substack people, thank God, still get this, but the
censor’s disease of thinking there are shortcuts to trust is spreading.
Lastly, while the Post certainly has its own problems in this area, the Guardian editors should puke with shame for even thinking about condemning anyone else’s “misinformation,” while their own fake story about Assange’s “secret talks”
with Paul Manafort in the Ecuadorian embassy remains up. Leaving an
obvious hoax uncorrected will tend to create a credibility problem, and
you compound it by pointing a finger elsewhere. There is a lesson in
this for health authorities, too. Clean your own houses, and maybe you
won’t have such a hard time being believed.
This puts the issue of the reliability of
authorities front and center, which is the main problem with pandemic
messaging. One does not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA,
CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump)
have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular
range of issues in the last two years.
wikipedia | The Book of Enoch (also 1 Enoch;[1]Ge'ez: መጽሐፈ ሄኖክ mätṣḥäfä henok) is an ancient Jewish religious work, ascribed by tradition to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah,
although modern scholars estimate the older sections (mainly in the
Book of the Watchers) to date from about 300 BC, and the latest part
(Book of Parables) probably to the first century BC.[2]
It is wholly extant only in the Ge'ez language, with Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and a few Greek and Latin
fragments. For this and other reasons, the traditional Ethiopian belief
is that the original language of the work was Ge'ez, whereas
non-Ethiopian scholars tend to assert that it was first written in
either Aramaic or Hebrew; Ephraim Isaac suggests that the Book of Enoch, like the Book of Daniel, was composed partially in Aramaic and partially in Hebrew.[4]:6 No Hebrew version is known to have survived. It is asserted in the book itself that its author was Enoch, before the Biblical Flood.
Some of the authors of the New Testament were familiar with some of the content of the story.[5] A short section of 1 Enoch (1:9) is cited in the New Testament, Epistle of Jude, Jude 1:14–15,
and is attributed there to "Enoch the Seventh from Adam" (1 En 60:8),
although this section of 1 Enoch is a midrash on Deuteronomy 33. Several
copies of the earlier sections of 1 Enoch were preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
tabletmag | But
what of the states and the federal government? These two tiers of the
U.S. constitutional order are merely the battlegrounds on which the
intra-elite feuds of the American metro areas are fought.
In
states like Texas, in which Republicans control the state government
while the big cities are controlled by the Democratic hourglass
coalition, there is a constant game of cat-and-mouse between progressive
city councils that enact left-wing policies and right-wing legislatures
passing legislation to overrule them. The Texas state legislature has
used state law to annul ordinances of the far-left Austin City Council
ranging from plastic bag bans, to enabling an explosion of homeless
encampments in public spaces, to declaring Austin a “sanctuary city”
whose police officers would be ordered to refuse to collaborate with
federal immigration authorities.
The
state usually wins, because under our constitutional system the
policies of cities, counties, and local governments under most state
constitutions can be overruled in many areas by the state government. In
this way, metro area conservatives, having lost city councils to
progressive Democrats, can use allies in state government to defeat
their enemies downtown.
But
the downtown Democratic coalition has allies of its own in the federal
government. Beginning in the 1960s, Democrats—by then having become the
urban party they are today—discovered that by means of federal
“grants-in-aid,” they could circumvent state legislatures and go
directly to Congress. According to one estimate,
in 2018 federal aid to state and local governments, taking the form of
grants to specific programs in areas from K-12 education to
environmental policy to transportation and infrastructure, amounted to
$697 billion, doled out via 1,386 separate programs that bind localities
to the federal government.
As a result of all of these targeted federal spending programs, about one-third of state spending actually comes from the federal government.
This
in turn means that a substantial number of state and local government
employees are in effect paid by the federal government, either to
administer grants or to ensure compliance with the many complicated
federal regulations attached to the grants.
Many
of the “culture war issues” that divide left and right are provoked by
the metro area left’s attempt to use federal regulations to impose
policies that could not be passed by the city council or the state
government. The threat that the federal government would cut off aid to
colleges and universities was used to intimidate them into compliance
with controversial leftist sexual harassment policies denying due
process to the accused under the Obama administration. Also in the Obama
years, the federal government used the threat of cutoffs of federal aid
and civil rights lawsuits to bully state governments and local school
districts into letting biological boys and men compete in female sports
teams and use female showers, locker rooms, and restrooms. In the case
of the latter controversy, the federal government’s pressure on state
legislatures and local school districts was reinforced by extortion from
“woke” national and multinational corporations, which fund Democrats.
When
federal grants-in-aid and corporate blackmail are understood as weapons
of the downtown Democrats, the power of Republican red state
legislatures to override blue city ordinances looks less impressive.
While targeted grants-in-aid may benefit only a few state citizens, it
is the noisy few who will fill up the phone lines to state legislators
if the federal government threatens to cut them off as part of a
progressive blackmail campaign. Democratic legislators have also found
ways of tying more popular forms of federal aid—for transportation,
housing, and schools—to more arcane priorities in cultural areas,
forcing localities to choose between embracing Democratic ideas of race,
gender, and sexual orientation or risk losing federal funding for
schools and highways.
Even
more intimidating is extortion by left-leaning corporations.
Particularly in poorer, more working-class Republican states, the state
economic development strategy often involves luring major national or
multinational corporate investment. The socially (though not
economically) progressive Democrats and liberal Republicans who run
corporate America can insist that the states competing for their money
not only shower them with tax breaks but also write New York and Bay
Area social values into state law, or suffer an investment boycott.
AP | The newspaper hit the
front porches of the wind-scarred prairie town on a Thursday afternoon:
Coronavirus numbers were spiking in the farming communities of western
Minnesota.
“Covid-19
cases straining rural clinics, hospitals, staff,” read the front-page
headline. Vaccinate to protect yourselves, health officials urged.
But
ask around Benson, stroll its three-block business district, and some
would tell a different story: The Swift County Monitor-News, the tiny
newspaper that’s reported the news here since 1886, is not telling the
truth. The vaccine is untested, they say, dangerous. And some will go
further: People, they’ll tell you, are being killed by COVID-19
vaccinations.
One little town. Three thousand people. Two starkly different realities.
It’s
another measure of how, in an America increasingly split by warring
visions of itself, division doesn’t just play out on cable television,
or in mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.
It
has seeped into the American fabric, all the way to Benson’s 12th
Street, where two neighbors -- each in his own well-kept, century-old
home -- can live in different worlds.
In one house is Reed
Anfinson, publisher, editor, photographer and reporter for the
Monitor-News. Most weeks, he writes every story on the paper’s front
page. He wrote that story on clinics struggling with COVID-19.
He’s
not the most popular man in the county. Lots of people disagree with
his politics. He deals with the occasional veiled threat. Sometimes, he
grudgingly worries about his safety.
While
his editorials lean left, he works hard to report the news straight.
But in an America of competing visions, some here say he has taken
sides.
Nowhere in the Monitor-News, for example, will you find reports that local people are dying because they’ve been inoculated.
“There are no alternative facts,” Anfinson says. “There is just the truth.”
But whose truth?
His
neighbor, Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran
pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully. He also
suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political
tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain
that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.
He
hasn’t seen the death certificates and hasn’t contacted health
authorities, but he’s sure the vaccine deaths occurred: “I just know
that I’m doing their funerals.”
He’s also certain that information “will never make it into the newspaper.”
Wolter’s
frustration boils over during a late breakfast in a town cafe. Seated
with a reporter, he starts talking as if Anfinson is there.
“You’re lying to people,” he says. “You flat-out lie about things.”
ianwelsh | In face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed.
They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are OK with
that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you
that everything is OK while they sprint for the lifeboats: aka. New
Zealand.)
For over 10 years now I’ve been telling Americans to get out. Oh,
it’s not that America’s the only developed nation heading for failed
state, for all intents and purposes there are no exceptions, not even
Sainted New Zealand, but America’s one of the leaders (Britain’s
another) and I have a lot of American readers. If you’re going to have
everything go sideways into a propeller, better later than sooner.
But most Americans won’t or can’t get out, and Musk and Bezo’s dreams
of escape to space aren’t going to happen for humanity en-masse: not in
time.
We’re all in a big ship, it’s going down. Some areas are already
underwater, others will be soon and the entire thing is going to sink.
And we have no lifeboats. We could, perhaps, have built some, if
we’d started 30 to 40 years ago with massive investments, but we didn’t,
and if our leaders were that able, they’d have been able to save the
ship, since that’s when they had to act.
But this article isn’t about “we are fucked”, it’s about “too many of
us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”
And one of the big reasons for this is the need for daddy. One of the
big hurdles to radicalization is that it means you can’t trust your
leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed, or both. That they
are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your interest, but
are your enemies.
I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.
But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and
intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from
them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your
leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own,
with friends, family and other groups because at some level you’re still
thinking that government or corporations will come thru and take care
of.
All your life government and corporations have taken care of you.
They’ve often been abusive parents, but they have made sure there’s food
available to buy, streets to walk and drive on, laws, jobs, etc, etc…
They run almost everything and you’re dependent on them for almost
everything just like you were dependent on your parents and teachers
when you were a child.
Bad parents still feed and house you. They’re monsters, but monsters
who kept you alive. Children love their abusive parents even as they
fear and hate them, and the same screwed up psychology pertains to
business and government leaders and those they lead.
An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.
But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate
change and environmental collapse and all our other problems (handle
doesn’t mean stop, but many problems are essentially trivial and can be
fixed any time our leadership wants to, like health care or spam calls)
means we need radical change. We need to change our system completely
and we need to entirely get rid of our current leadership class, who
have proved their incompetence and ill will.
annehelen | The vast majority of societies on this planet still understand family
as their primary, most cherished bond. Blood relation or not, there is
an understanding that forsaking these bonds is a form of unforgivable
treachery, understandable only in circumstances of abject trauma. Within
this paradigm, all parties should do whatever possible to maintain the
bonds of family, even if those bonds require continued suffering.
In
some societies, this understanding is changing. There are several,
overlapping reasons for this change — related to mobility, LGBTQ rights
and visibility, access to therapy, and more — yet for people who are
estranged, the experience can still feel incredibly solitary. Most
people who aren’t estranged are very, very bad at talking about it; in
society at large, estrangement remains something to be “sorry” about: a
regret, a sorrow, a throbbing absence.
But it doesn’t have to be
this way. There are so many reasons why people cut off contact with
close and distant family. Some are immediately legible in description,
others are not, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that contact
became unendurable, damaging, or, in my case, brought out the very worst
in who I was. As you’ll see in the answers below, it is rarely swift.
It is rarely without pain. But that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.
While putting together these responses, I was reading Rin Reczek and Emmy Bosley-Smith’s Families We Keep,
forthcoming this May, which surveys the various negotiations of LGBTQ
people who’ve chosen to maintain or cut off ties to family members. It’s
a difficult book, filled with rejection and compromise intercut by
flashes of stability and support. And their conclusions are bracing:
they argue that “compulsory kinship,” in which we work to sustain bonds
to family irregardless of the harm those bonds have caused, is at once insidious and deeply damaging.
“The
compulsory relationship between parents and children might sound like a
great deal to some—especially those with healthy parent-child ties,”
Reczek and Bosley-Smith write. “Of course, the parent–adult child tie
can result in a life full of positivity, love, and kindness. But for
many people this is not the case. We believe if parent-adult child
relationships aren’t good for everyone, then parents’ primacy in our
social structure and in adult children’s social identities must be
questioned. Even though there are some “good” parents, the fact that
“bad” ones have so much power should provoke us to radically rethink our
societal reliance on this kinship institution.”
Reczek and
Bosley-Smith invite us to consider what an “ethic of care” might look
like, in which all people, no matter their age or their existing family,
could experience “a sense of belong and identity, alongside emotional,
practical, and financial help.” That sense can come from community, but
it should also come from the safety nets we put in place as a society.
Put differently, your safety and nourishment as a child, as a young
adult, as a parent, as someone with specific medical or emotional needs,
as an aging person — none of it should be wholly contingent on the luck
(truly!) of being born into a family that is financially or emotionally
able to provide them for you.
All of these stories, as one of
the respondents put it, are “beautifully complex.” If you’re estranged, I
hope they make you feel less alone in some way. If you’re not, I hope
they offer some insight into how to talk with and support those who are
estranged — but more importantly, that they push you to think about
what’s lost when we rely so fully on family as our primary source of
support.
houstonpublicmedia |The state rent relief program is out of money. The national eviction moratorium ended months ago. Pandemic unemployment benefits in Texas expired over the summer. While the pandemic isn’t over, most of the state’s court safety regulations have ended or are set to expire soon.
That means more eviction filings and,
in some areas, crowded courtrooms that make it near impossible to stay
safely distant indoors: So far this month, more than 4,600 eviction cases have been filed in Harris County as the omicron variant led to climbing case counts and hospitalizations.
During the week of Jan. 10, more than
2,033 cases were filed in Harris County, compared to 693 cases filed
during the same period last year, according to Jeff Reichman, principal at the consulting firm January Advisors.
“That’s almost three times as many
cases filed this January as there were last January,” Reichman said.
“We’re really on trend with pre-pandemic numbers.”
In 2020, 2,180 cases were filed during the same time period.
Earlier this month, during the week
of Jan. 10, more than 2,033 cases were filed in Harris County compared
to 693 cases filed last year, Reichman said. During the same week of
2020, 2,180 cases were filed.
The increase in eviction cases is
hitting some courts more than others: Just as some neighborhoods have
far more evictions, certain courts take on far more cases.
Last Tuesday, Harris County Judge
Lincoln Goodwin’s court scheduled 275 evictions to be heard on the same
day — half of them at 9 a.m. and the other half at 1 p.m.
Every seat in the courtroom was
taken. A line stretched down the hallway and into the parking lot. The
judge and court staff weren’t wearing masks.
Eric Kwartler, an attorney with South
Texas College of Law, said he feels at risk of getting COVID-19 when
he’s there representing renters.
“Do I feel safe? No. I never do,” Kwartler said. “I never feel safe when I go into an environment like that.”
The court has cut back on virtual
hearings, Kwartler added, only allowing virtual hearings for those who
submit proof of a positive COVID test.
“I had a client cough on me at one point and then tell the court that his wife was at home with COVID,” Kwartler said.
"EGREGORE: An engergized astral form produced consciously or unconsciously by human agency. In particular, (a) a strongly characterized form, usually an archetypal image, produced by the imaginative and emotional energies of a religious or magical group collectively, or (b) an astral shape of any kind, deliberately formulated by a magician to carry a specific force. The Aurum Solis"The Kabbalah names 72...national angelic regents, which the Hebrews call Elohim; the metaphysical technical term Egregors is also used for them. Derived from the Greek word egreoros, it means "watcher" or "guardian." The office of a Watcher is to protect from outside pressures a region or ethnic group assigned to its care. The region is always measured off from another posing a threat of some sort to it. A given group of persons (the group of those being protected) is "tied" to a certain area of jurisdiction....Here, too, we meet the "riddle of the founding of cities and states...." What is more, both the ancient Romans, and quite recently the Chinese, have recognized the existence of guardian spirits set over cities. Indeed, one author reports as follows on the occult was wages on enemy cities by ancient Rome: "The Romans, when besieging a city, made a habit of carefullly enquiring the name of the city and of its guardian spirit. When they knew these, they would summon the guardian spirit of the city and its inhabitants, and conquer it." Willy Schrodter, from: Commentaries on The Occult Philosophy of Agrippa"Originally, it was human beings who, in union with certain spiritual powers, generated the egregors of science, of medicine, and of Canada or any other country. But, then, they lost control of them; and these egregors directed them in such a way as to make them become unconscious and passive. As soon as an egregor causes blood to flow in any manner whatsoever it soils its inner light with an instinctive power and becomes a negative force of domination.""The egregors that are created unconsciously, and in fits of passion, live only to destroy, giving birth to instincts of power and domination inside their members. They are the true cause of war and of the conflicts pitting everyone against everyone else."Olivier Manitara, from: "The Egregor of the Dove and the Triumph of Free Peace"What is an egregore?
thesaker | Since it is impossible to change the terms of breeding, we must
accept there will always be different rules for different classes of
humans.
Do not believe in anything they are telling you about equality or
democracy. In America and Europe, if you have superior pedigree or test
an IQ above 135, you are exempt from homework, tests and schools. Those
mindless activities are for the serfs. You get your audition with the
master breeders and they’ll make things happen. Think of it as
diplomatic clearance. There are no barriers and no checks.
Also, there is less bureaucracy. If a university or school wants you,
they will fabricate a reason, don’t worry. Like a sports stipend or a
fake prize, a large family donation or a fat recommendation letter. In
Chile and Argentina I hear they call this corruption ‘getting a
fast-pass’, as in ‘a fast-pass for American Disneyland’. It means that
you can skip the lines and that long waiting hours do not apply to you. I
like that. I will use ‘fast-pass’ from now on.
In China, there is a fast-pass system called bao-song
(package-sent). It means forget school and grades, this kid you must
admit. It comes with a minor catch though. The student cannot choose his
major, the state does. As if his family cared. But this sounds very
British, doesn’t it? In good-old Oxbridge, it doesn’t really matter what
subject you master in, as long as you get… your Master. Every nation
has its fast-pass lane.
After centuries of selection, most breeders encounter severe defects
and inadequacies in their stock. Oh forces of darkness. In one old
German castle town’s youth hostel, the masters stop-watched us
candidates recite pointless word-lists and tested us for reaction time
and unnatural pathology and thought-crime. In a Chinese university, they
passed around a tape measure and measured our head circumference,
because for some reasons the masters believed that head-size mattered
and that 24 5/8 inches meant that you needed your caps custom-made.
Who could forget such an examination? If you stroll the campuses of
Todai or Beida,… you have never seen so many large heads in one place.
They look like aliens. Can’t be made unseen. This is the result of
excessive over-breeding. Same at Harvard University. Have you ever seen
the head-sizes of Ted Kennedy or Noam Chomsky?
All our nation‘s top mental clinics and laboratories are adjunct to
our top universities. The master breeders suffer from the worst mental
abnormalities and defects, from horrible misanthropy to psychopathy.
Then there is the plague of schisms with these people. Schismatic
persons can easily turn into traitors and backstabbers. Like Leon
Trotsky or Leo Tolstoy.
There is also a lot of old money corruption, because degenerates like
our Karl-Theodor pay a lot of money to get into top universities, but
are unintelligent.
All these details and head-scratching at the top levels goes over the
heads of the general population. The general population is abused six
ways from Sunday. For example, the elite sociopaths tell the general
population through literature and media and the education system that
the working and underclasses surely are the most debauched. But that
cannot be true, if you really think about it: First, the working classes
are too busy working. Next, nine tenths of the general population have
only access to one tenth of all females. The rulers may be fewer in
numbers, but they own everything, and they are the worst abusers,
torturers and tyrants – by far and in between.
The sociopaths that rule us are the most unimaginably cruelest and
most abusive towards all human beings, but especially towards women,
children and the pure and healthy races, who are completely unaware of
the master breeders’ satanic schemes. The majority of the people do not
grasp the human hierarchy and their own enslavement. They are stuck in
evolution like chimpanzees or zebras.
WaPo | Here’s why I support a vaccine passport: Because it’s time for people
who follow best practices and science — a vast majority of our state by
any measure — to be able to return to their daily lives and routines. As
the coronavirus evolves, so must our strategies.
There
have been numerous, well-intended campaigns to counter misinformation
about vaccines. However, the reality is that even though a small
minority of Maryland adults remain unvaccinated, these unvaccinated
individuals perpetuate unnecessary challenges and have allowed variants
such as omicron to develop at faster rates. To date, these actions have
directly contributed to the 938,314 confirmed cases
and 12,904 deaths our neighbors have suffered. More than 2,000
Marylanders are hospitalized from the effects of covid-19, the disease
caused by the coronavirus. The overwhelming majority of those
hospitalized are unvaccinated patients.
Vaccine
passports not only encourage people to do the right thing, but they
also could mitigate even more negative impacts to households and
Maryland’s economy. Vaccine passports would require people to provide
proof of vaccination before entering public spaces such as restaurants,
bars, coffee shops, bowling alleys, museums, concert venues and fitness
facilities.
Valid
credentials that would be recognized as having “passport status”
include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records, a digital
photo of CDC documentation or a certificate from MD MyIR (a mobile
vaccination record service).
I
recognize there are valid logistical concerns, such as the lack of
staffing for businesses to enforce passports and the impact on families
and children who might not have the proper identification to show with
their vaccination passport. As a consistent advocate for keeping
Maryland businesses open and safe, I believe this is when it is up to
the state to step in to support our businesses and protect our
communities, whether by providing subsidies that aid in implementation
or allowing businesses to opt-in so that customers can choose to
patronize establishments that provide them a comfortable and safe
environment. It is critical for our leadership to push to the front and
meet the occasion to secure a safer, thriving and equitable future. I am
confident we can do so.
dailymail | A woman who stopped to help after a truck
carrying 100 lab monkeys crashed in Pennsylvania fears she's caught an
illness after one of the macaques hissed in her face, leaving her with
pink eye symptoms.
Michelle Fallon,
from Danville near Scranton, was driving directly behind the vehicle
when it crashed, throwing animal crates all over the highway and
smashing some to pieces. Three of the macaques escaped and went on the
run, but all have since been captured and humanely euthanized. All of
the other monkeys - who'd arrived in the US from Mauritius that morning,
and were en route to a lab, have been accounted for.
Fallon has now had a rabies shot, and wrote about the symptoms she has since suffered on Facebook - and also told PA Homepage that she'd developed symptoms of pink eye - an inflammation or infection of the eye ball.
She
said: 'I was close to the monkeys, I touched the crates, I walked
through their feces so I was very close. So I called (a helpline) to
inquire, you know, was I safe?
'Because the monkey did hiss at me and there were feces around, and I did have an open cut, they just want to be precautious.'
Fallon
said she got out to help both the driver and the animals in their
cages, initially believing them to be cats. When she approached and put
her hand on the cage, she says the monkey hissed at her.
The
day following the accident, Fallon suddenly developed a cough and pink
eye, which became so bad that she had to visit the emergency room at
Geisinger Medical Center in Danville. Fist tap Dale.
wired |In the first days of the
new year, on the marshy coastal edge of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, a
hunter shot an American widgeon, a rusty-fronted duck with a pale beak
and a brilliant green stripe. This was not a big deal; the state’s duck
hunting season runs from Thanksgiving through the end of January.
Neither was what happened next: Before taking it home, the hunter let a
wildlife biologist affiliated with a government program swab the carcass
for lab analysis.
But what happened after that
was a big deal indeed. After the sample went through its routine check
at Clemson University, it made an unusual second stop at a federal lab
halfway across the country, in Iowa. The news of what was in the sample
percolated through a pyramid of agencies, and on January 14 the US
Department of Agriculture revealed why it had attracted
so much scrutiny: The South Carolina duck was carrying the Asian strain
of H5N1 avian influenza, the first sighting of that pathogen in the
continental US in years.
But not the last. Just a few days later, the USDA disclosed that two more birds
shot by hunters also carried the same pathogen: a teal, shot in the
same South Carolina county, and a northern shoveler shot in the far
northeast corner of North Carolina, about 400 miles away. The virus in
all three was what is known as highly pathogenic—meaning it could cause
fast-moving, fatal disease in other bird species, such as poultry,
though it was not making the ducks ill.
Three
birds out of the millions that American hunters shoot each year might
seem like nothing—but the findings have sent a ripple of disquiet
through the community of scientists who monitor animal diseases. In
2015, that same strain of flu landed in the Midwest’s turkey industry
and caused the largest animal-disease outbreak
ever seen in the US, killing or causing the destruction of more than 50
million birds and costing the US economy more than $3 billion.
Human-health experts are uneasy as well. Since 2003, that flu has sickened at least 863 people across the world and killed more than half of them. Other avian flu strains have made hundreds more people ill. Before Covid arrived, avian flu was considered the disease most likely to cause a transnational outbreak.
It
is far too soon to say whether the arrival of this virus in the US is a
blip, an imminent danger to agriculture, or a zoonotic pathogen probing
for a path to attack humanity. But it is a reminder that Covid is not
the only disease with pandemic potential, and of how easy it is to lose
focus when it comes to other possible threats. The possibility of a
human- or animal-origin strain of flu swamping the world once seemed so
imminent that back in 2005 the White House wrote a national strategy for
it. But researchers say the surveillance schemes that would pick up its
movement have since been allowed to drift.
“In
wildlife disease surveillance, we’re always chasing a crisis,” says
David Stallknecht, director of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife
Disease Study, a research institute housed at the University of Georgia.
“And as soon as the crisis is over, the interest goes down. It’s
difficult to keep going long-term. People are here to do the work, but
the money isn't there to support it.”
johnhelmer | US Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed publicly in Geneva on Friday, January 21, that he will not negotiate a no-war agreement with the Russians because he cannot. This is already understood by the Russians; by the French and Germans; and by several senior officials of the Biden Administration.
The evidence of Blinken’s incapacity is in the words he says.
It was during the last world war, when US policymakers had next to no intelligence on how their German counterparts were thinking and what they were intending, that a group of American sociologists were engaged by the War Department, as the Pentagon was called then, to do what was called content analysis of German propaganda. One of the sociologists, a Russian émigré Nathan Leites, went on to apply the same method to Soviet publications in order to uncover what Leites called the operational code of the Politburo. That was in 1951. It was immediately used by US negotiators during the Korean War armistice negotiations which began in July of that year and ran for two years. By then Leites had produced a sequel, A Study of Bolshevism. Both were paid for and published by RAND, the think-tank created in 1945 by the US Air Force, the Douglas Aircraft Company, and the War Department.
Since then the method has not been used on US Government officials, at least not by RAND nor publicly by any American sociologist.
When the RAND method is used to analyze what Blinken told the US press, following his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, it is revealed that Blinken has no intention whatever of negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Russians on any terms. According to the scientific method devised by the best and brightest Americans for dealing with their enemies, it’s now clear from Blinken’s own words that he is unable to understand what Russians tell him. In the mind behind the words there is only one compulsive idea – attack, punish, destroy Russia.
The State Department has published the transcript of Blinken’s statement and answers to questions at his press conference.
*****************************
The late senator John McCain described Blinken as not only unqualified but dangerous to America.
Blinken directed some of the most murderous initiatives of the Obama era: Libya, Syria, and Gaza. But worse, he then cashed-in withJohn Thain(of the gold-plated Merrill office with the $90K rug who insisted on $20 billion in bonuses from the government bail-out of the bankrupt firm) on thisPrivate Equity/SPACdesigned to cash-in on Blinken and Lloyd Austin’s connections, especially to skim Covid relief monies.
Thismurderous greed-headis a complete horror-show — emblematic of why the voters have deserted theshamelessly corruptDemocrats in droves. Blinken and Austin are transparently ginning-up this “crisis” in order to personally profit from arms sales by needlessly militarizing Eastern Europe against a non-existant “invasion” threat from Russia — whowillact to protect the large Russian populations stranded in the former SSR’s by the disorderly breakup of the Soviet Union from being liquidated.
theatlantic | Old songs now represent 70
percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from
MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new
music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should
look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse:
The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the
market is coming from old songs.
The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams.
That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs
actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music.
The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the
names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater
Revival and The Police.
I
encountered this phenomenon myself recently at a retail store, where
the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on
“Message in a Bottle” (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A
few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the
entire staff was under 30 but every song was more than 40 years old. I
asked my server: “Why are you playing this old music?” She looked at me
in surprise before answering: “Oh, I like these songs.”
Never
before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating
so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing
the hits of decades past instead. Success was always short-lived in the
music business, but now even new songs that become bona fide hits can
pass unnoticed by much of the population.
Only
songs released in the past 18 months get classified as “new” in the MRC
database, so people could conceivably be listening to a lot of
two-year-old songs, rather than 60-year-old ones. But I doubt these old
playlists consist of songs from the year before last. Even if they did,
that fact would still represent a repudiation of the pop-culture
industry, which is almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.
Every
week I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, band managers,
and other professionals who want to hype the newest new thing. Their
livelihoods depend on it. The entire business model of the music
industry is built on promoting new songs. As a music writer, I’m
expected to do the same, as are radio stations, retailers, DJs,
nightclub owners, editors, playlist curators, and everyone else with
skin in the game. Yet all the evidence indicates that few listeners are
paying attention.
Consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack
of reaction, because the cultural response was little more than a yawn.
I follow thousands of music professionals on social media, and I didn’t
encounter a single expression of annoyance or regret that the biggest
annual event in new music had been put on hold. That’s ominous.
Can
you imagine how angry fans would be if the Super Bowl or NBA Finals
were delayed? People would riot in the streets. But the Grammy Awards go
missing in action, and hardly anyone notices.
eand.co |It is impossible — flatlyimpossible — for theaverage Americanto make ends meet.
I can tell you that as an economist, one of the only really good ones
America’s ever had. Americans grew poor because their economy failed
them. But a poor society can’t afford many things. Things which matter.
Like democracy, truth, reason, goodness, decency.
Societies faced with sudden descents into poverty implode into
authoritarianism, just the way America is. Greed broke America in this
larger, truer sense.
But
Americans don’t really understand it yet, I think, just how extreme and
out of control greed really is in America — and how, paradoxically, it
left society poor. Too poor to afford to even be a functioning country or democracy anymore, in the end, and so America’s just imploding now.
Let’s
do a little math first, to prove the point that it’s impossible to make
ends meet, and then I’ll teach you a little bit about how what’s normal
in America is completely and totally abnormal in the rest of the entire
world, more or less.
The median American income is about $35K.
That is what millions of Americans earn. For a “household,” meaning in
economic statistics, a family of four, it rises to about $60K.
It is impossible, and I mean impossible, to live on that level income. That is a median income more suited to a poor country than a rich one. But let’s prove it.
Rent? The average rent for an apartment was $1124 in 2021. That’s $14,000. That’s half of the average person’s income eaten up by rent alone. Now we have…all the other expenses of life. Let’s start with the other big one in America: healthcare. The average cost
for a family paying for healthcare was almost exactly the same: $1152.
Bang. Another $14K. That’s the average American’s entire income gone, on
just rent and healthcare.
But
maybe you object — my employer pays for my healthcare. Or maybe I don’t
even want healthcare (LOL, you mean you can’t afford it, I get it,
we’ll come back to that). Sure — it’s not going to make much difference
in the end. The average American spends about $1200
“out-of-pocket” even if they’re insured by their employer — let’s call
it $1500, because that’s surely an underestimate. That leaves us with
maybe about 14K of income per year for the average person — and we still
haven’t gotten to most bills.
You need a car in America, to get much of anywhere. You need insurance for it. The average monthly car payment is $600. Let’s call insurance another $100. That’s $700…a month. Or $8400 per year. Suddenly, we’re left with about $5K to cover everything else you need in life.
Water,
electricity, gas to put in the car. Internet. A mobile phone. The
average water bill’s around $100 per month — bang, another $1200 gone —
and now we’re down to just about $3800. Internet and a phone? Call them
another $100 per month. Now we’re down to $2600. Electricity? Another
$100 per month. Now we’re down to just $1400. Average annual cost of gas
to put in that car? It’s about $1100.
Now you’ve got just $300 left.
But you still have to feed and clothe yourself. Your kids. Pay
for random stuff like maybe a toy here and there, a treat. I’m sure
I’ve left plenty of stuff out that isn’t remotely a luxury — like paying
off student loans.
The point I’m trying to make should be crystal clear by now — not least because you’re probably living it. Making ends meet in America is flatly impossible. It
cannot be done. My lovely wife’s income is so low that it doesn’t even
cover her expenses — car, travel, a hotel every now and then because
she’s asked to work overtime regularly.
The economic effect of all this is somewhere between a joke and an embarassment. I’m
subsidising this world-famous billion dollar institution which pays its
“administrators” millions, because my wife isn’t even paid enough to
cover her basic living expenses. Think of how ridiculous that is. The reason those administrators earn millions is because I’m effectively paying them to employ my wife — after they get a cut of overcharging Americans for operations and medicine.But this story isn’t personal — it’s social. Those economics — people can’t make ends meet — are absolutely fatal for a society.
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
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