Rock musician Neil Young got a bee up his bonnet about Joe Rogan spreading Unapproved Thought, and told Spotify that they needed to either remove Rogan or remove his music. It wasn’t a hard choice.
Spotify has sided with its podcast superstar over Neil Young.
The legendary folk singer gave the streaming behemoth an ultimatum earlier this week, saying he refused to allow his music on the same platform as Joe Rogan. The “Heart of Gold” singer accused Rogan and his podcast of spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccines.
Spotify reportedly paid more than $100 million deal to be the exclusive home of Rogan’s show. Young, meanwhile, stands to lose 60% of his streaming income from his defiant stance, he said in a statement on his website.
“We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users,” a spokesperson for the company told the Wall Street Journal. “With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators.”
This is bunk. Spotify should have jack squat concern about safety for it’s listeners, at least beyond slapping a warning on lethal pranks like the Fork In the Electric Outlet Challenge.
Since the start of the pandemic, the spokesman noted, Spotify has removed more than 20,000 COVID-related podcast episodes. Still, Young’s protests were not sufficient for it to drop its lucrative star talker.
“We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon,” the spokesperson added.
Rogan’s podcast has attracted an estimated 11 million listeners.
Never mind the Lynyrd Skynyrd references, how little money most artists make out of streaming, or the irony of the “This Note’s For You” guy wanting to censor someone for not toting the government/big pharma line. If this was anything more than a publicity ploy (of the “Wait, you’re still alive?” type) on Young’s part, he’s badly overplayed his hand. But I want to talk about the oddity of Rock’s Eternal Now.
Because it was the music boomers grew up with, and it’s still on the radio and used in tons of movies, rock music of the 60s and 70s has stayed an active part of the culture much longer than the popular music of earlier eras did.
Neil Young had one only one number one hit, “Heart of Gold,” in April of 1972. That’s a few months shy of half a century ago. Go back half a century before that, to April of 1922, and this is the song that was topping the charts:
If people remember the name Fanny Brice at all today, it’s because Barbara Streisand played her in a movie in 1968 (which is to say more than half a century ago). How many rock musicians were listening to Fanny Brice songs in 1972? Approximate answer: None.
Which makes you wonder how many of today’s musicians are listening to Neil Young, a half-century after his heyday. I’m guessing more than Fanny Brice, but not many.
Just as we only know bits of the early 20th century songbook because they were featured on Looney Tunes (“Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal…”), it’s likely that any Neil Young listeners under the age of 50 or so only know of him from TV sound tracks or Jimmy Fallon imitating him. And most of his hardcore fans are not in Spotify’s demographic, since they already have the CDs they bought to replace the records and 8-tracks they bought in their youth.
One repeated line from “Heart of Gold” is “And I’m getting old.” So is the entire cohort of golden age Rock and Roll.
I think we’ve long past the point when data has proven that lockdowns, vaccine mandates and covid theater masking are not only ineffective but actually harmful and do nothing to control the spread of coronavirus.
Americans are done with all this nonsense, and insincere appeals “for the greater good” simply won’t work any more.
And we’re sure as hell not to comply with any of your social justice garbage anymore.
When it comes to longer videos I find interesting, I have a system for posting them here:
I see a longer video I think BattleSwarm readers will be interested in.
I go “Hey, I’ll go ahead and post that as soon as I have time to watch the whole video!”
I never have time to watch the full video.
I never post the video.
I think there are some drawbacks to the system.
This Babylon Bee (Seth Dillon, Kyle Mann, and Ethan Nicolle) interview with Elon Musk from back in December is one of those longer videos I meant to get to before now. Rather than continue to hold onto this forever, I’ve watched more of it and am posting it here.
Some topics of discussion:
How Saturday Night Live and The Onion used to be funny before they became so hard left they refused to make fun of Democrats.
The threat to western civilization by the “woke mind virus.”
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It basically gives mean people a reason, it gives them a shield, to be mean and cruel, armored with false virtue.”
Kyle Mann: “The left is almost this religion now,where they’re so serious, and they believe what they believe with such intensity, that for us to make fun of them you know for them, it’s like you’re making fun of God or salvation.”
Musk is much higher on “sustainable energy” than I am (which you would expect for a guy that owns solar power companies), but does say shutting down nuclear power plants is a big mistake.
The craziness of trying to shut down Dave Chappelle.
“Part of why I moved to Texas, it’s just fewer strings tying you down.”
If you’re below a certain age, or didn’t keep track of UK politics, you may not remember the Winter of Discontent. In late 1978 and early 1979, the combination of inflation, harsh winter weather, Labour government dysfunction and trade union strikes brought the UK economy to its knees and ordinary citizens to a boiling point. Rail and lorry strikes led to spot shortages, and a haulers strike left mounds of garbage littering London strikes. The end result was an upheavel that would bring Margaret Thatcher to power as prime minister, and the new Tory government would swiftly move to crush the power of the unions to disrupt public order. Labour would not regain power for nearly 18 years.
Now Joe Biden has his own winter of discontent brewing, this one engendered not by unions strikes, but by vaccine-mandate driven supply disruptions, soft on crime policies, and ruinous “green” energy policies.
First, #BareShelvesBiden still seems to be plaguing much of the country:
#BareShelfBiden this is ridiculous. Meat prices have skyrocketed if you're lucky enough to find some. Local butcher had to shut down for 2 days because he couldn't keep up w/the orders, that's where we've arrived at. Ppl are hungry, which is only 2 steps removed from desperate. pic.twitter.com/2UAkYnctT1
There appear to be shortages from Boston to Arkansas. (Again, for the record, I’m not seeing such shortages in my neck of Central Texas, where there are bare shelves for only a few items.)
Now a big winter storm has hit the Northeast, which is expected to make everything worse. That region is usually prepared for heavy snow and ice, but that was before vaccine mandates worsened the trucker shortages. Now with record numbers of people quitting their jobs, I suspect both truckers and road maintenance crews are in shorter supply than ever. Plus New England’s reliance on “green energy” and rejection of natural gas pipelines has made everything worse.
One thing that’s making shortages of all goods worse: soft on crime policies in locales with George Soros-backed DAs has encouraged widespread train robbery.
Medical equipment, designer handbags, luggage, throw pillows, airline parts, children’s artwork, even a new wine fridge – all those items and more have been found stolen off Union Pacific trains and discarded alongside the tracks in East LA.
Images of thousands of stolen and discarded packages alongside the Union Pacific train tracks near Union Station have people around the world asking – how does this happen? Apparently, it’s a near perfect storm of an ongoing train robbery problem, the pandemic, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s policy of no-cash bail arrests.
“I have been with Union Pacific for 16 years, and I have never, ever seen this situation to this degree,” said Lupe Valdez, the company’s senior director of public affairs.
Valdez says, on average, 90 of their containers are compromised each day. But between October 2020 and October 2021, train robberies have picked up exponentially by a whopping 356%. Union Pacific has increased its enforcement and patrols, and has put drones to work, but now they are looking into diverting trains so they don’t pass through Los Angeles County at all.
“We are making arrests, but what our officers are seeing on the ground is that people are basically being arrested, there is no bail, they come out the next day and come back to rob our trains,” Valdez said.
Union Pacific’s chief has a meeting with the LAPD next week, and last month, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, calling this a “spiraling crisis” and imploring his office to hold criminals accountable.
“Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals,” the letter says. “In fact criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequences.”
remember that amazon packaging train robbery thing im LA from last week?
Images of thousands of stolen & discarded packages alongside train tracks in Los Angeles – a near perfect storm of a train robbery problem, the pandemic & the LA County District Attorney’s policy of no-cash bail arrests pic.twitter.com/Nds6HtMXpd
All of this bodes ill for ordinary Americans who just want to buy groceries, heat their homes, and not have their Amazon orders mysteriously disappear due to repeat offenders put back on the streets by radical Soros-backed social justice warrior DAs.
All these problems (save the weather) are ones democrats have either created or made worse.
Larger cities will be limited to 250 metres — less than half the height of China’s tallest buildings.
Now, special exemptions may still be given if a small city really needs a new skyscraper, but they absolutely, definitely cannot go above 250-metres.
Likewise, a bigger city could go higher than that if it has a convincing case, but if it wants to go over 500-metres then forget it. No more Shanghai Towers or Ping An Finance Centers — and that’s final.
There are even new rules to follow past the 100-metre mark. To go higher than that a building will need to meet certain seismic performance and fire safety requirements.
Which sort of suggests that they didn’t have seismic performance and fire safety requirements before. Or maybe not adequate requirements. (Previously.)
Here’s the article in video form:
The usual subjects are touched on: The real estate market collapse, buildings so large there was no way all the space in them would ever be rented, Ghost Cities, etc. But the fact that the skyscraper boom got so far out of whack with economic reality is just another indication of how much of China’s “economic miracle” is a complete mirage.
Scottish commentator Neil Oliver has noticed strangely coordinated messaging arising among rarefied strata of our global elites about the supposed perfidy of the unvaccinated all at the same time.
“Build back better,” “the unvaccinated aren’t citizens,” etc. all hymns from the same book. But who wrote the book?
Ted Cruz posted this classic Saturday Night Live skit to his Facebook page, and since I had been looking for an embeddable copy for a while, I’m passing the joy onto you:
For younger viewers: Yes, once upon a time, Saturday Night Live was willing to make fun of Democratic presidents…
Over the past year, DeSantis has emerged as one of the most articulate political spokesmen for the anti–critical race theory movement. His new policy agenda builds on successful anti-CRT legislation in other states but goes two steps further. First, it provides parents with a “private right of action,” which allows them to sue offending institutions for violations, gain information through legal discovery, and, if they win in the courts, collect attorney’s fees. Second, it tackles critical race theory in corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training programs, which, DeSantis says, sometimes promote racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and harassment, in violation of state civil rights laws.
At heart, the battle against critical race theory is a fight against entrenched bureaucracies that have used public institutions to promote their own racialist ideology. “This is an elite-driven phenomenon being driven by bureaucratic elites, elites in universities, and elites in corporate America, and they’re trying to shove it down the throats of the American people,” DeSantis said. “You’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
Following his speech, DeSantis invited me to address the crowd. I explained that the reason critical race theory has upset so many Americans is that it speaks to two deep reservoirs of human sentiment: citizens’ desire for self-government and parents’ desire to shape the moral and educational development of their children. Elite institutions have attempted to step between parent and child.
DeSantis has deftly positioned himself as a protector of middle-American families. One of the guest speakers, Lacaysha Howell, a biracial mother from Sarasota, said that left-wing teachers tried to persuade her daughter that the white side of their family was oppressive. Another speaker, Eulalia Jimenez, a Cuban-American mother from the Miami area, said that left-wing indoctrination in schools reminded her of her father’s warnings about Communism in his native Cuba. Both believed that critical race theory was poison to the American Dream.
As they begin their next session in January, Florida legislators have the opportunity to craft the gold standard for “culture war” policy. The governor’s team has worked with a range of interested parties, including the Manhattan Institute, which has crafted model language for prohibiting racialist indoctrination and providing curriculum transparency to parents. The battle is ultimately about shaping public policy in accord with public values. “I think we have an ability [to] just draw a line in the sand and say, ‘That’s not the type of society that we want here in the state of Florida,’” said DeSantis yesterday. The stakes are high—and all eyes are on Florida to deliver.
How the Democratic Media Complex managed to destroy what was left in the public’s trust in it:
That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient.
Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests. pic.twitter.com/DvOzIr5JX8
As usual, elite institutions — media, government, public health authorities — love to whine about the refusal of the public to trust their pronouncements, complaining people turn to other less credentialed and worthy sources.
Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted four men on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in a scheme to rip off the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by submitting over 80 false applications for forgivable loans and writing checks to relatives and fictional employees, among other fraudulent activities.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release on December 15 that 29-year-old Hamza Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Khalid Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Abdul Fatani of Richmond, and 53-year-old Syed Ali of Sugar Land could be sentenced to up to 20 years on each count of wire fraud.
The indictments against them are the most recent in an apparent scheme that prosecutors say involved 15 defendants from Texas and Illinois, all of whom are accused of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The DOJ stated that Khalid Abbas, Fatani, Ali, and another defendant, Houston resident Amir Aqeel, 53, have been charged with money laundering in the superseding indictment. The money laundering counts carry potential sentences of up to 10 years.
Last year, a grand jury also indicted Aqeel on a charge of aggravated identity theft. The government accuses Aqeel of using stolen identities to apply for the PPP loans.
According to the DOJ, several of the accused have already pleaded guilty for their involvement, including Siddiq Azeemuddin, 42, of Naperville, Illinois, Richard Reuth, 58, of Spring, and Raheel Malik, 41, of Sugar Land, all of whom entered their pleas in October. Houston residents Abdul Farahshah, 70, Jesus Perez, 31, and Bijan Rajabi, 68, pleaded guilty in late November.
Rifat Bajwa, 53, of Richmond, Pardeep Basra, 52, of Houston, Mayer Misak, 41, of Cypress, and Mauricio Navia, 42, of Katy were also indicted last year on charges of participating in the conspiracy and committing wire fraud.
Why, it’s almost like just about all the defendants share some characteristic in common. If only I could put my finger on it…
Speaking of criminals, did mentioned that a second CNN employee was being investigated for child sex allegations? “The allegations against Rick Saleeby, a former senior producer for Jake Tapper’s “The Lead,” appear to be connected to reporting by Project Veritas. Saleeby resigned from CNN this month.” It’s hard to keep the media pedophiles straight without a scorecard…
The City of Austin’s director of the Office of Police Oversight (OPO), Farah Muscadin, abused her authority, a third-party arbitrator decided this week.
In a 31-page decision, Lynn Gomez, the arbitrator, ruled that Muscadin and the OPO violated Article 16 of the Austin Police Department’s employment contract that was negotiated in 2018. Article 16 governs the parameters of civilian oversight of the department, which progressive groups lobbied hard for during the labor standoff.
“Contrary to the city’s claim, Director Muscadin was not acting within the scope of her authority…[she] clearly was seeking to dictate some future outcome rather than simply making a recommendation as Art. 16 permits,” Gomez ruled.
“[T]he evidence and arguments raise[d] by the city indicate that the city does not consider itself or OPO bound by Article 16’s provisions.”
Has the Biden Amdenistration tipped its hand that considers Taiwan too strategically important to not defend it in the case of a Chinese attack?
Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told a Senate hearing three weeks ago that Taiwan was “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defence of vital US interests”. In words strikingly similar to MacArthur’s, he emphasised the island’s location “at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of US allies and partners”.
This may well be remembered as the moment Washington came clean on its intentions regarding Taiwan. In Beijing at least, the statement is being read as dropping all pretence that the US could acquiesce to a unification of Taiwan with China.
Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in China, believes that US strategic thinking regarding Taiwan has always followed the lines laid out by MacArthur.
Even after establishing diplomatic relations with China, the US “worked to ensure the continuation of a state of separation across the Taiwan Strait”, Wu said. “When we ask the US if they do not hope to see the unification of China, they deny that. But judging from the US’s concrete actions, it is clear that they indeed do not hope to see China unify. Ely Ratner has now said this out loud.”
In Washington, too, some observers think the testimony allows little conclusion other than that the US should not allow Taiwan to become part of China under any circumstances.
Hopefully true, but betting on Joe Biden’s stalwart fortitude is putting your hopes on an extremely weak horse…
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez spotted in Miami Beach while New York City Flu Manchu cases hit alltime highs. As always, Covid Theater rules are for the little people.
I really should have bought this for Dwight for Christmas.
The Critical Drinker is not thrilled at the latest Matrix film:
Ultimately The Matrix Regenerations fails on just about every level possible. It fails to properly honor the past by leaving it well enough alone. It fails to tell a compelling new story, or add new ideas to the world it created. It fails to establish interesting new characters, or take old ones in a new direction. It fails to surpass the spectacle, energy and originality of a 20 year old film. And most of all it fails to deliver a compelling reason for its own existence. The Matrix Retaliations is a film that never should have been made in the first place.
Left-wing sponsors vs. right-wing sponsors:
This satirical video is based on an undeniable truth: the bulk of mainstream corporate and billionaire money resides in and supports liberal-left, not right-wing, media. As the Dem Party became the preferred vehicle of oligarchs, their largesse goes to those urging votes for it. https://t.co/UpuF2ZuGxr
77 year ago today, General George S. Patton’s 4th armored division relieved the siege of Bastogne.
Everyone who knows anything about The Battle of the Bulge knows about Bastogne, but here Nicholas Moran offers up five lesser known facts about the battle.
