Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Tom Hayes: Does TV try too hard to present balance?

Dara O'Briain sets the record straight about the public understanding of facts. He talks about crime statistics, science, herbal medicine, and the tendency of TV to try to present a "fair and balanced" coverage - which results in him using some strong language, so you might want to consider where you are as you watch this.



I think Dara is Ireland's slightly more refined, restrained version of Lewis Black. Slightly.

Carrie Prejean Breast Job: K2 Productions wants money back - but which K2 Productions?

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Seems Carrie Prejean can't catch a break. Remember her? The former Miss California who's not-so-smart foray into anti-Gay Marriage activism and overall alleged unprofessionalism cost her the title is now apparently owes $5,200 to K2 Productions for a boob job they paid for.


Carrie Prejean


But who's K2 Productions?

They're a North Carolina film and video production company according to their website, which leads me to wonder if they did this for publicity. If so, I certainly got suckered into this one, huh?

Not really.

I mean there's the Atlanta-based K2 Production company as well. They too are involved in the film business, but they provide "equipment."

Uh, just not boobs.

Turns out the North Carolina company and the Atlanta firm are enjoying some free pub because Miss California USA organizers also use the same company name but with a California adress! I'm laughing as I write this, it's so funny.

It's a classic case of a firm not doing its Internet homework in establishing a unique company name and making sure that its not like any other firm name when a search for K2 Productions is done online.

So North Carolina and Atlanta's K2 Production company can have part of the boob job money, huh?

I think the LA version of the K2 Production firms needs to get its messaging straight. If I were representing Carrie Prejean I'd have a field day with this. I'm sorry but this is too funny not to make fun of.

Keith Lewis, the person who's over K2 Productions in LA and who reportedly paid for the boob job for Carrie Prejean should be smart and recover the money by contracting for Carrie to work for the other K2 Production companies and get whatever percentage of revenue he can secure.

Otherwise the whole deal's just really silly in my view.

Kane West not dead; Kanye West not in an accident

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Kanye West is not dead, contrary to some news rumors. This prank has happened before involving other celebrities and here we go again. Twitter's the origin for the latest round of this trick, this time focusing on Kanye West.

According to LaLate.com, this happened to Miley Cyrus and Lil Wayne this year, and now Kanye West.

Some tweets report that he was in a car accident, but the truth is that happened in 2002. He's fine.

Why is West the target? I think the whole Taylor Swift controversy has something to do with it; an incident that even caused President Obama to refer to him as a "jackass":


Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Interracial couple sues Louisiana Judge Bardwell, who refused to marry them

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According to the Associated Press and the news website NOLA.com, Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell of Tangipahoa Parish, which is 50 miles from New Orleans (and within the NFL's one-hour-from-stadium influence radius for the 2013 Super Bowl).

The lawsuit focuses on the emotional and financial damage Humphrey and McKay suffered from Judge Bardwell's actions. Bardwell has openly communicated his dislike for interracial marriage, although I really think he just doesn't like marriage between blacks and whites, and refused to resign, and has said on television he will not resign..



That folks is just an awful video of a person, or what the lake Richard Pryor would call "a cracker". By standing up for his racist views (which he says aren't racist), Keith Bardwell has become a hero to white supremacists around America, with White Supremacist News claiming that scripture "frowns" on mixed-marriages.

David Duke, who's website has to tell you he has a PhD (HA! HA! Bwahahaha!!) trots out the to-be-expected photo of O.J. Simpson and the late Nicole Brown Simpson, and writes his expected garbage views on interracial marriage.

Duke feels the World's closing in on him since the GOP selected it's first black head in Michael Steele, having recently went off the deep end he was already on about that development.

But I digress.

What white supremacists either don't get or aren't ready to understand because racism is a mental illness is that what Bardwell did was against the U.S. Constitution - in other words it was un-American - so McKay and Humphrey have a very good case. Law professors over at "Prison Planet" website, say that what Judge Bardwell did should not have happened.

I still think the NFL should weigh in here, and I'm surprised the NFL Players Association has not as of this writing taken a position on the matter. Many NFL players are in interracial marriages and so should be very concerned about this case and that the NFL has the 2013 Super Bowl in Louisiana.

The NFL should plan to move the Super Bowl unless the state takes hard action against Bardwell and changes its laws to effectively punish this kind of behavior. By doing nothing, Louisiana is backing the unconstitutional actions of a judge.

Stay tuned.

Glenn Beck fails to reject racist Louisiana Judge; follows racist guru

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Why Glenn Beck's around may be to remind us of just how stupid some Americans can be. Glenn Beck missed a great chance to show he wasn't what many expect him to be, racist, when he failed to make a statement against Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell, who will not marry blacks and whites in Louisiana in the year 2009.


Glenn Beck


As I've said..



..racism is a mental illness that must be pointed to and treated at every turn. It's harder to do with folks like Glenn Beck polluting the airwaves with a garbage bin full of trashy ideas.

There's no definitive, undeniable statement by Beck against what Bardwell did as of this writing, and his website just had a link to the Yahoo page on the news until even that was removed (but there's a cached version that leads to the Yahoo page).

But there's something else.

Glen Beck has a person others have refered to as his "guru" who for some wacko reason thought slavery basically was a good thing. (Where, for God's sake, do these people come from?  Not Earth.  They must be alien; and their behavior's questionably legal.)

I'm not kidding.

His name is W. Cleon Skousen, the man Salon explains changed Beck's life.

The late W. Cleon Skousen's, who died in 2006, is also a man for whom FBI head J. Edgar Hoover kept a 2,000 page file on, and referred to black children as "pickaninnies" and wildly claimed American slave owners were the "worst victims" of the slavery system.

Why the heck does Glen Beck back such a man with these retrograde beliefs? I have to agree with blogger Oliver Willis that Skousen's writings comes off as those from a crackpot, but even Willis can't put a finger on why Beck was drawn to him.

But what gets me about Beck is how he hides his own racial issues by calling those who aren't racist, racist for bring up that he's racist. Got that? It's the modern Couch Potato Conservative strategy. Michelle Malkin does it; so does Glenn Beck. And both have no idea what it means to be a real conservative, as Michelle thinks she does.

Of course she's wrong, but that's common for her blog. Still a cool person, just wrong most of the time.

The Classic Conservative knows and understands economics and law and is a policy wonk, believes in free markets but understands the need for government intervention, supports social liberalism and personal freedom but not at the expense of the civil rights of others, and is most of all careful with how tax payer dollars are spent and reluctant to take taxes unless they're necessary.

The Classic Conservative defends and encorages the development of free markets and democracy around the World, but not at the expense of the environment or the poor. The Classic Conservative insists that governments have economic development programs in place to build industry and employ its poorest people, and have reasonable social safety nets for them.  The Classic Conservative is pro-business. 

If you add all that up, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck are not Classic Conservatives. In fact, their ideas have contaminated the minds of innocent people who lack an intellectual set of guideposts to help them steer through the junk issued by these pundits.

I just provided one.

If you want to call a Classic Conservative  or "NeoLiberal" go ahead. It's the camp I fall into. But regardless it calls for a level of intellectual rigor that's totally devoid in the mindless rantings of Malkin, Beck, or Limbaugh.

Miley Cyrus with Timbaland in duet on "We Belong to the Music"

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Pop singer Miley Cyrus is with R and B singer Timbaland and it's the first song on his new album called "We Belong to the Music".


Timbaland

While Timbaland's attracted Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry and The Fray, Miley Cyrus singing with him is a coup for both performers. It will attract both the female teenage and male teenage audiences that would be split in a choice between Miley Cyrus and Timbaland, and with Cyrus' fanatical group of followers, result in an incredibly successful album and single. It's also clear that, with her Teen Choice Award performance safely behind her...



...and her Twitter account a thing of the past for now, Miley's expanding her range to R and B, and even rap. Meanwhile, Timbaland is reportedly wanting a "Twilight" look for his music video.   Why?  It's the teenage and young adult demographic and he's aggressively going after it.

Stay tuned; interesting news there.

Flickr down - Flickr up now after "Here thar be dragons"

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Earlier today the social networking photo website Flickr was down. The reason given for the problem impacting millions of users was that Flickr's engineers were in the middle of an upgrade. But what Flickr's to be commended for is timely updates to its users. Here's an example from the Flickr Forum post:

12:50 PM PDT: What happened? What happened earlier was that we deployed a change this morning, which introduced a bug and ended up overwhelming our WWW servers, then the API. Photos were still being served from our image farms. If they were embedded in blogs, those were still working, but if they were being displayed from something that called our API, like a slideshow or a badge, it would not. There is still some catching up to do with our offline task boxes, a couple of the WWW servers are still a little wonky, but otherwise things are back to speed. Again, we're sorry for the disruptions. :)

11:30 AM PDT: Sorry for the disruption to your Flickr-ing today (or tonight, wherever you may be!), we're still working out a few issues, you may not be getting some recent activity mails, and if we identify more issues, we'll post about them here, but we're getting things back for y'all.


That's called great service and transparency, or as much as one can expect on the Internet from a company of any kind. Now, if only we can get the California DMV to show such an amazing level of transparency, government will have truly served the people.