I don't know much about Joe Rogan but from what i have heard he is being portrayed as the typical boorish, loud mouth with ignorant views on things like Covid Vaccinations and Climate Change and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell don't like him for spreading misinformation around Coronavirus.
Reading his Wikipedia entry, i expected a ridiculous Trump like character and it says he started out as a comedian and supports same-sex marriage, gay rights, women's rights, universal health care and universal basic income and even endorsed Bernie Sanders during the last Election and in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, he firstly said that young and healthy people should not be concerned about
getting COVID-19 and then apologised, withdrew his remarks and called himself 'a moron'
Where the controversy comes in is his support on his podcast for non-endorsed medical treatments for COVID-19 such as Ivermectin, a drug usually taken to treat parasitic infestations which led to a spike in poison-related hospitalisations of people who had self-medicated with Ivermectin designed to treat ailments in livestock.
With his podcast having 1 million listeners, his words have a far reach and in 2020 he signed a $100 million deal with Spotify which is where singers Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have now ordered their music be removed from as the streaming giant was allowing 'irresponsible people to spread lies that are costing people their lives'.
Even singer James Blunt has weighed in, showing a surprising sense of humour that if Spotify doesn't immediately remove Joe Rogan, he will release new music onto the platform.
Rogan doesn't sound like your normal, uneducated right winger who usually spouts off inane nonsense about things they know nothing about but due to his reach, what he says is very influential so to actively promote non-endorsed medical procedures which are actually resulting in peoples deaths is highly dangerous although the Invermectin he endorsed is not the Invermectin that his listeners have been buying over the counter and stupidly ingesting.
Spotify, having shelled out a fortune to host his podcast, have probably done a cost analysis and worked out that the money earned by listeners to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell back catalogue is chickenfeed compared to what they make from Rogan so they can wave goodbye to those two with no real ill-effect but things may get interesting if some bigger names join the boycott.
Rogan, for his part, should make it crystal clear that the Ivermectin he supports IS NOT THE LIVESTOCK STUFF YOU BUY OVER THE COUNTER SO DON'T BE SO EFFING STUPID TO TAKE IT because in a country where 4 people died drinking bleach after the terminally stupid Donald Trump endorsed that, these things obviously need to be spelt out and it may not sooth Young and Mitchell but it could save some lives.
As I said at the start, i know nothing of Rogan and he may have some other views i vehemently disagree with but it seems it is a problem he could easily go partway to fixing and he showed before that he is not averse to correcting himself and calling himself a moron when necessary.
The upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics starting on 4th February will operate under some really strict social distancing rules to prevent the Games from becoming a super-spreader event and as such athletes have been instructed to minimise hugs, high-fives and handshakes although it seems that having sex is fine because each athlete will find five free condoms in their hotel rooms.
It has long been a tradition of the Olympic Committee to promote safe sex, the delayed 2020 Olympics in South Korea handed out 160,000 free condoms to athletes, but at the same time, China has a responsibility to keep people apart during the pandemic although to be fair, most couples can have sex without high-fiving each other or shaking hands.
It has been suggested that the athletes take them home as Olympic souvenirs but you can picture the scene when they return home and excitedly claim: 'Look darling, no medals but i have brought home a souvenir from the Olympics, three Olympic condoms' and darling saying questioningly...'Hmm...Only Three?'
Everyone got all excited on Tuesday when it was reported that the Sue Gray report into the Downing Street law breaking was set to be released imminently, but as Tuesday turned into Wednesday and then Thursday there was still no sign of it.
The question of where the report had gone were being asked and Boris said it wasn't him, he hadn't seen it and the MET Police said it wasn't them guv, they had no objections to Gray's findings being published in full even though they were investigating at least 7 of the 17 'Parties' that were held in No 10 during lock-down.
Today though the MET said actually as they were investigating the Parties, the report will have to omit the 'most serious illegalities' which they are looking into so not to prejudice their own investigations but other than that, Sue Gray can publish her report on the other Downing Street parties.
Presumably then Sue Gray is loading Parties.doc into Word on her computer and is busily making use of the delete button and having to realign all her pictures while warily keeping an eye on the clock on the wall.
Many Conservative MPs are waiting to see the outcome of Ms Gray's inquiry before deciding whether to call for a vote of no confidence in Bojo but they may have to wait a while longer but it is nice that the Police are finally doing something after initially refusing to investigate Downing St for weeks despite all the overwhelming evidence.
It is being suggested that there has been a stitch up between the MET and Boris Johnson, pointing to the launching of the investigation right before Sue Gray’s report is due and then delaying and squashing the most damaging bits of it while anger at the Prime Minister is still high.
Boris, for his part, is trying desperately to get people to look at what is happening on the border of the Ukraine rather than him and his Birthday Party and is probably the only person outside of the Kremlin wishing Russia would hurry up and invade already.
As a grown up i really should be more interested in things like economics but whenever i try and find out about things like interest rates i find my mind wandering elsewhere and considering things like if i took out both my eyes and pointed them at each other, what would i see and the whole conversation is wasted.
With that in mind i sat down with a Financial Expert today fully prepared to clear my mind of everything and concentrate on why interest rates are so high and what it means for us.
Before the first chart came out i was resisting the urge to yawn and then i noticed that she was wearing some lovely stylish red kitten heel shoes which complimented her red pencil skirt, they looked expensive and probably were, this woman would not be wearing Matalan shoes.
Jolting myself back to reality, the conversation had moved onto consumer spending and mortgages with some up and down lines which she had drawn at some point so i mentally shook myself down to listen properly and learn.
Something about charges on other forms of credit, such as credit card loans, bank loans, and car loans and...wow, that's a fancy pen, a fountain pen i think, wonder if it's a Christmas present, Christmas seems such a long time ago now and we are almost at the end of January already...'so if the cost of a £100 coat rises by £5, then inflation is 5%'.
I nodded, scribbled 'Coat' on my pad and waited while she wrote one to five on a sheet of paper and said: 'Firstly its economies coming out of Covid restrictions and the increase in...', that sky looks grey, hope it doesn't rain, i was hoping to nip to the hairdressers on the way home tonight as i won't have time tomorrow, i got that thing at 9am, who the hell arranges a meeting at 9am on a Saturday morning, oops, she looking at me and asking me if i understood that bit, better nod and look like i'm writing things down.
'Ok, and finally the Bank of England are responsible...', good, she said finally, i really do like those shoes, would go great with that white blouse i got from Next last summer..bugger, she's putting her pen down and asking me if there is anything i want to go back over?
I closed my pad quickly and said that she explained it really well and thanked her for her time and made off quickly back to my car where i opened my pad to see the single word 'Coat' written.
So in short, inflation rates are rising due to people in Covid hit economies buying more expensive coats...or something like that.
Back in the early 90s, theorising that a person could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past facing mirror images which were not his own, and so Dr Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping that the next leap will be the leap home, but alas, he never returned home.
Quantum Leap was one of the golden shows of the 90s along with programmes like Buffy and Frasier that i either made sure i was home to watch or set the video for and although i am not fond of rebooting shows, preferring to leave them in the past and not ruin the memory, the rumour is that Quantum Leap is coming back and continuing from where it left off almost 30 years ago.
Sadly, Dean Stockwell who played Al has gone to that great Quantum leap accelerator in the sky but Scott Bakula has apparently signed up to pull on Sam's Hush Puppies again and that would work for me although towards the end it did seem like the team was running out of ideas and started doing 'celebrity' jumps such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Lee Harvey Oswald.
They are also doing the same thing with Frasier, continuing the series as 'of now' with Frasier leaving his radio show in Seattle although the joy of Frasier was the supporting cast such as Niles and Daphne and no news if they will be appearing in it also.
No news on Buffy but as that was the perfect TV show, i hope that it never gets the nod and that stays firmly in the past as nothing they could make could recapture that and would be painful to see Buffy and the Scooby Gang as no longer beautiful, funny teenagers fighting the forces of darkness.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament so it was a good thing when five nuclear weapon-possessing countries released a joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding an arms races.
The statement from he United States (10,500 nuclear weapons), Russia (14,000), the United Kingdom (200), China (241), and France (300) said that that they take their responsibilities as nuclear-possessor states seriously and reiterated that: 'a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought' and backed their commitment 'to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.'
Nice words but they ring a bit hollow when you consider that all five are modernizing or expanding their nuclear arsenals which isn't really actively reducing the current global stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Some have pointed out that in this time of high tension among some of the nuclear states, the statement
is welcome but it is hard to make a case of why in the 21st Century we still need nuclear arms apart from the status it provides so it appears that we are holding on to these extraordinarily dangerous weapons not out of necessity but because of the cachet and feeling of superiority it gives us.
It does seem a huge risk to hold onto weapons which if used would likely end life on Earth and it seems the people with them have no desire to give them up, despite what they may say.
