© Richard Harbaugh - Handout/A.M.P.A.S. via Getty Images
The Academy intends to require just
a negative PCR test or a negative rapid antigen test on the day of the event, unlike the SAG Awards and Critics Choice Awards, which will require proof of vaccination.
The Oscars will be back at the Dolby Theatre on March 27, less than a year after the pandemic forced Hollywood's biggest night to be held as a scaled-down affair at Los Angeles' Union Station with strict COVID testing requirements. In the time since, safe and free COVID vaccines have become widely available and mandated for everything from dining out to attending sporting events.
But,
The Hollywood Reporter has learned, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
is planning not to mandate proof of vaccination (with or without a booster) in order to attend this year's ceremony. Instead, it intends to require a negative PCR test or a negative rapid antigen test on the day of the event.
Comment: That's probably wise because vaccination doesn't prevent infection nor transmission - it likely makes one more vulnerable, overall - and because it probably wouldn't do the vaccine pushers any favors if a recently jabbed starlet collapsed on the red carpet, as occurred to a comedienne at a recent stand up show:
Baylen Linnekin
ReasonSun, 13 Feb 2022 10:03 UTC
© (Photo 163145380 / Beer ColleenMichaels | Dreamstime.com)
A
new study is pouring cold beer on Seattle's soda tax. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, reveals that since the city I call home
adopted a soda tax in 2018, residents have swapped out soda and replaced that soda with beer. Pointedly, the study says Seattle's soda tax "induced" consumers to buy more beer."The good people of Seattle responded to a tax on sugary drinks by buying more beer," Christopher Snowdon, director of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and a leading critic of the nanny state,
tweeted after the study's release.
The PLoS study, by University of Illinois-Chicago researchers Lisa M. Powell and Julien Lader, compared sales of beer in Seattle both before and since adoption of the soda tax
with comparable sales in nearby Portland, Oregon, which has no soda tax.
RTSat, 12 Feb 2022 22:16 UTC
© Getty Images /Carmen MandatoJoe Rogan
Comedian Joe Rogan has called on CNN to "be honest," after hosts Brian Stelter and Don Lemon criticized his hugely popular Spotify podcast. Rogan attacked CNN's falling ratings, saying "nobody listens to" these presenters.
"Stop this editorial perspective with guys like Brian Stelter and Don Lemon that nobody listens to," Rogan said on the latest episode of his podcast on Thursday. "Nobody is, like, chiming in saying, 'Oh yeah, finally we get the voice of reason.' Nobody thinks that."
Comment: Not that it matters, but for CNN to bemoan people watching Joe Rogan instead of corporate news is a false dichotomy. These numbers don't indicate who among Rogan's viewership are using his show as their sole source of news. People can, and most probably do, get their news from more than one source. But it's ironic that Rogan has given a piece of unsolicited advice to the network (which, considering their numbers, they should strongly consider): "If you're in business and your business is the news and you want to get more people to pay attention, you should be honest."
See also:
A new Maru Public Opinion poll shows a possible career-ending backlash against Justin Trudeau's handling of the freedom protesters.
In a
National Post interview, 32-year industry veteran John Wright, executive vice president of Maru Public Opinion said, "The last time I've seen numbers even close to this was in the final days of Brian Mulroney."
The Maru poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9 to 10, found that only 16 percent of Canadians would vote for Trudeau based on his actions of the last two weeks. This is echoed in a new Abacus poll, which currently finds Trudeau to have his worst favorability rating in over a year.
Comment: More
from RT:
According to the latest poll, Canadians equally blame Trudeau and the truckers for the situation reaching a boiling point. The Maru poll found that 44% of Canadians believe the Canadian leader "inflamed" the crisis, while 46% deem the truckers themselves guilty of "the incitement and escalation." Some 53% of respondents said that the PM "looked weak in the face of threats to the country."
And while 56% of Canadians polled showed no sympathy for the Freedom Convoy, public opinion has shifted against Trudeau's harsh Covid-19 rules. A new Angus Reid poll showed that 54% of Canadians support an immediate halt to all pandemic restrictions, a stark contrast to the 56% who said as recently as in December they would have supported another round of lockdowns over Omicron.
See also:
Damian Wilson
RTSat, 12 Feb 2022 21:20 UTC
© Hannah Jewell
If there's one cheery takeaway from enduring Hannah Jewell's recently published
We Need Snowflakes it must be that her claim the people that pejorative is directed at really don't like it. Which, of course, is why people bandy the word about in the first place.
"The term snowflake is a weapon to neutralise a challenge to the status quo," writes the author. "And worst of all, a person who calls you a snowflake is probably not just a good old-fashioned arsehole... they may be something even worse. They may be revealing their membership of or at least interest in the politics of the alt-right."
And there we have it, in a nutshell. While this is all part of Jewell's conclusion, it's also the starting point for her book, subtitled 'in defence of the sensitive, the angry and the offended'.
Comment: Dr. Jordan Peterson has a more nuanced view of the personalities types that tend to gravitate to the Left. They tend to be high in openness, neuroticism, and creativity, and low in conscientiousness, which makes them terrible managers.
We need open and innovative individuals to be functioning as generators of new ideas with which society may be invigorated, whether in art or the sciences. But they should be firmly on the edges of society, where they can create without disturbing the stable civil structures the majority of people depend on. The last thing these open, creative types should be, is in charge of the structure. Concomitantly, those whose role is to maintain the stable center (the managers) must be attentive to that group, watching for the best of the ideas that bubble up, and adopt them ("instantly", as JP put it), to keep society from ossifying from too much deference to what may be outdated and no longer useful tradition.
Unfortunately, the children are currently attempting to run things.
© Picryl
The Trump presidency sent the left into paroxysms of hysterical terror. How could that self-made billionaire beat their beloved and prototypically corrupt Hillary? Everyone knows they cheated in 2016, too, but they seriously underestimated Trump's popularity.
Thus, the Russia hoax , begun during the campaign, was escalated. It was an entirely fabricated story they were certain that it would take Trump out hopefully before his inauguration. That didn't happen, so they kept it up for years until the truth of their grand plan emerged.
In the meantime, they perfected their systems of perpetrating election fraud by 2020. The fix was in. The perpetually nasty Biden was installed by a cabal who knew well that he was suffering from dementia but thought they could manage him as they moved ahead with the Obama agenda: destroy America as founded. Eric Hoffer was prescient when he observed long ago that "nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America."
© Wikimedia CommonsDries van Agt
At the behest of a pro-Palestinian organization whose critics say is antisemitic, administrators at more than a dozen
Dutch universities are instructing their staff to list their interactions with Israeli and Jewish organizations.
The order followed a request sent last month by
The Rights Forum, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, to the offices of multiple universities. The universities are gathering the information because
the group's request was certified as what is known in the Netherlands as a WOB request, meaning a query certified by the country's prosecution service under a 1991 freedom of information law and binding on public or state-funded organizations.
It is unclear whether the universities will complete the full request by passing on the information to The Rights Forum.
RTSat, 12 Feb 2022 03:35 UTC
© East Bay Times/Ethan ElkindCA Senator Scott Wiener • CA Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks
Democratic California officials have introduced a bill which would force businesses to require their employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 or face fines and other penalties.
California State Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks - a Democrat who worked on former President Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns - introduced the
bill on Thursday alongside fellow Democratic assembly members Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, Evan Low, and Akilah Weber.
"This bill would require an employer to require each person who is an employee or independent contractor, and who is eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, to show proof to the employer, or an authorized agent thereof, that the person has been vaccinated against COVID-19."
The bill proposed exempting only those with a medical condition or "sincerely held religious belief" that would prevent them from getting vaccinated. Employers would then have to show proof to the state authorities that the employees complied with the requirement by January 23 or face penalties.
Comment: While the rest of the world is awakening from its covid coma...diehards never give up!
Joseph Wulfsohn
Fox NewsSat, 12 Feb 2022 17:58 UTC
© Michael Schwartz / WireImage / Gettyimages.ruJoe Rogan
Podcast giant Joe Rogan offered advice to the legacy media as efforts to get him deplatformed from Spotify continue.
On Thursday's installment of
The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan spoke about the "problem" various news sources have with him that "more people believe me or trust me or want to listen to me talk."
"The answer is not to silence me, the answer is [for] you to do better," Rogan said. "The answer is for you to have better arguments. When you're on television talking about how I'm taking horse paste, and you know that's not true. 'He's taking horse dewormer.'"
"What you should have said, 'How did Joe Rogan get better so quick? How come he got COVID that's killing everybody and he was better in five days, negative in five days, working out in six days?' How come that's never discussed?" Rogan asked.
Comment: Jon Stewart has a
few thoughts:
Stewart, the former star of Comedy Central's The Daily Show who is now hosting his own gabfest on Apple's streaming service, said Thursday that "canceling" Rogan would be akin to banning Stewart from television for his opposition to the Iraq war in 2003.
"The New York Times, right, was a giant purveyor of misinformation, and disinformation," Stewart said of the newspaper's editorial support for the Iraq war.
"And that's as vaunted a media organization as you can find, but there was no accountability for them."
The Times and other mainstream news organizations were criticized for unquestioningly reporting the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and that those efforts justified the US invasion.
No such weapons were ever found in Iraq after American troops removed Saddam from power and installed a friendly government in Baghdad.
Stewart said Thursday that while he was "very vocal" in opposing the Iraq war in 2003, he was in the minority.
"Couldn't I have gone down and fallen down this — if Viacom or Comedy Central had wanted to censor me — or had wanted to take me off the — look, I'm not owed a platform. Nobody is," he said.
Stewart then added: "But my point is, these are shifting sands, and I think I get concerned with, well, who gets to decide?"
Rogan hit out at mainstream media outlets such as CNN on Thursday, calling them "dishonest" for their portrayal of his podcast.
Manojna Maddipatla
NASDAQFri, 11 Feb 2022 06:59 UTC
Credit: REUTERS/DADO RUVIC
The European Medicines Agency's safety committee said on Friday it was reviewing reports of heavy menstrual bleeding and absence of menstruation from women who had received COVID vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
The assessment was in view of reports of menstrual disorders after receiving either of the two vaccines, both based on messenger RNA technology, and it was not yet clear whether there was a causal link, the agency said.
It was not yet clear whether there was a causal link between the vaccines and the reports, the agency said.
Menstrual disorders can occur due to a range of underlying medical conditions as well as from stress and tiredness, the EMA said, adding that cases of such disorders had also been reported following COVID-19 infection.
Comment: The majority of official health bodies aren't being commissioned to study the potential harms of the Covid jabs, and they're ignoring the data collated and presented by other bodies:
Comment: That's probably wise because vaccination doesn't prevent infection nor transmission - it likely makes one more vulnerable, overall - and because it probably wouldn't do the vaccine pushers any favors if a recently jabbed starlet collapsed on the red carpet, as occurred to a comedienne at a recent stand up show: