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French Documentary: People will kill to be on television
03.18.2010
09:12 pm
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Willing to kill for a shot at reality TV fame? A new documentary that aired tonight in France, The Game of Death (Le Jeu Du Mort) featured 80 pathological participants who thought they were taking part in a new reality TV show called Zone Xtreme. They were unwitting participants in a spectacle that closely resembled psychologist Stanley Milgram’s infamous “shocking” experiments of nearly forty years ago that tested how far human obedience could be taken. This is worse.

In the fake show, fake “contestants” played by actors were forced to answer questions. If they answered incorrectly, one of the participants would be asked to give the contestant an electric shock. No shocks were actually administered; the actor contestants pretended to get electrocuted.

Egged on by the beautiful TV hostess and an apparently bloodthirsty studio audience shouting “Punishment!,” only 16 of the 80 participants stopped before reaching the final, lethal 460 volt shock. People apparently kept up the shocks even when the contestant appeared to be dead or unresponsive.

French Documentary Shows Normal People Are Willing to Kill on Television (/Film)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.18.2010
09:12 pm
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Alex Chilton Honored In Congress By Representative Steve Cohen
03.18.2010
01:34 pm
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A very sincere tribute. Moving.
 

Posted by Brad Laner
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03.18.2010
01:34 pm
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Alex Chilton RIP
03.17.2010
09:17 pm
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via The Commercial Appeal, thx Ned Raggett
 
Fuck, I’m gutted.

Pop hitmaker, cult icon, and Memphis rock icon iconoclast Alex Chilton has died. The singer and guitarist, best known as a member of ‘60s pop-soul act the Box Tops and the ‘70s power-pop act Big Star, died today at a hospital in New Orleans. Chilton, 59, had been complaining of about his health earlier today. He was taken by paramedics to the emergency room where he was pronounced dead. The cause of death is believed to be a heart attack.

 

 

Posted by Brad Laner
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03.17.2010
09:17 pm
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Nearly 1 in 4 Californians lack health insurance
03.16.2010
11:21 pm
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A UCLA study finds a jump in 2009 to 8.2 million adults and children from 6.4 million in 2007 stemming largely from job cuts and the loss of employer-sponsored coverage amid the recession. 1 in 4 people do not have health insurance in the richest and most populous state in the country? This is simply astonishing news and yet there are still people who doubt the need for universal health care? It pains me that people really exist who are so mean and so cheap they’d deny their fellow man a life free from worries that they’ll go bankrupt or become homeless as they go through chemo. It’s sick. It could be them next time! Do these idiots not realize this?

PUBLIC OPTION NOW!

From the front page of today’s Los Angeles TImes:

People who were uninsured for part or all of 2009 accounted for 24.3% of California’s population under age 65—a dramatic increase from 2007 driven largely by Californians who lost employer-sponsored health insurance, particularly over the last year.

Among those over age 18, nearly 1 in 3 had no insurance for all or part of 2009, the UCLA researchers found. The ranks of uninsured children also grew.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.16.2010
11:21 pm
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The Situation in Greece
03.11.2010
08:46 pm
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This is the second major strike this week. All news broadcasts and public services—including schools and all public transportation—were canceled and even the police and fireman—who cannot strike—let it be known that their sympathies were with the people. Additionally there was a huge protest last Friday that involved tear gas and a lot of property destruction. Keep it up, Greece!

More on the riots in Greece from the Telegraph:

The strike grounded all flights and brought public transport to a halt. State hospitals were left with emergency staff only and all news broadcasts were suspended as workers walked off the job for 24 hours to protest spending cuts and tax hikes designed to tackle the country’s debt crisis.

Riot police fired tear gas to disperse rock-throwing protesters at one point of the demonstration as more than 10,000 strikers and protesters marched through central Athens, banging drums and chanting slogans such as “no sacrifice for plutocracy,” and “real jobs, higher pay.” People draped banners from apartment buildings reading: “No more sacrifices, war against war.”

The demonstrators included a group of about 100 youths wearing crash helmets and ski masks, some of whom smashed windows of a department store and bank, and sprayed riot police with brown paint. Shopkeepers along the demonstration route scrambled to roll down their shutters, while a few blocks away, people sat at outdoor restaurants, continuing their meals.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2010
08:46 pm
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Glenn Beck is losing more and more advertisers
03.11.2010
07:11 pm
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Why in the world would any respectable company want to associate their product with a sociopathic sack of shit like Glenn Beck? And what ad buyer at which advertising agency would be dumb enough in 2010 to tell their client they should be purchasing advertising on the Glenn Beck show?!?! Whoever sold TurboTax on the idea should be drummed out of the advertising business for good. What fucking idiocy.

Nice work over at the StopBeck blog. Note how fast it was for TurboTax to pull out:

On March 9th, TurboTax advertisements began running on Glenn Beck’s show on the Fox News Channel.  Participants in the StopBeck effort promptly sprang to action.  Less than 24 hours later, TurboTax announced that they would be pulling their advertisements from Glenn Beck’s show.

This brings the total number of advertisers to drop Glenn Beck to 120.  On a related note, the broadcast of Glenn Beck’s show in the U.K. has been running without any advertisers for over a month now.

TurboTax’s statement:

Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show.

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2010
07:11 pm
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Groovy Psych-Folk Sounds By Azzam The American’s Dad
03.08.2010
06:07 pm
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OK, so it wasn’t Adam Gadahn that they caught. Whatev. But within the brief ripple of time that “Azzam the American” was on the radar again (oooo be scared, kids) my wise old pal Ron Nachmann pointed me in the direction of this article from last year pointing out that Gadahn’s father is none other than Phil Pearlman, psych-folk private press LP maker extraordinaire under such guises as “The Beat of The Earth”, “The Electronic Hole” and the delightfully monikered “Relatively Clean Rivers”. Since most of the links to the music in the original article are now dead I have tracked down a bunch of samples of said music to peruse for the sake of the edutainment of us all. Really nice stuff, truth be told.
 

 
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Posted by Brad Laner
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03.08.2010
06:07 pm
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Little Green Footballs interview gets some little green trolls
03.07.2010
10:02 pm
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I refer you to the comments thread of this week’s Dangerous Minds interview with Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs. This afternoon Charles linked to the interview from his popular blog and within a matter of minutes people were posting about the interview both there and here. Some pro, some con (I get compared to Sean Hannity for instance!), but some just nasty and fairly pointless, such as one item (since deleted by us and not at the request of Charles, either) which managed to slip in both a homophobic epithet and a not-so-veiled death threat!

Charming.

As Charles replied “Welcome to my world! These are exactly the people I was talking about in the interview.” I sent him the IP address and in a matter of minutes he tracked the guy down and found several instances of his email address posted online elsewhere.

Views were initially slow on this episode, but are trending upwards quickly. I’ll leave this up for another day before posting part 2.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.07.2010
10:02 pm
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Raw Video: Quake splits road in Chile
03.03.2010
12:05 am
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via KGW Portland
thx ML Compton !

Posted by Brad Laner
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03.03.2010
12:05 am
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Of Gordon Brown’s temper and a ‘citric idiot’: Robert Popper’s crank call punks British media
03.02.2010
06:05 pm
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A prank phone call made by British author and comedian Robert Popper apparently fooled a few of the British dailies, including The Telegraph, The Sun and (sort of) The Financial Times. Popper, who makes crank calls and puts them on his website, called talk radio station LBC and pretended to be a woman who had seen Gordon Brown throw a tangerine into a laminating machine during a temper tantrum. The hoax was reported as true in The Telegraph and The Sun. The Financial Times also published a blog post on their website, stating that the call was probably a hoax and have since issued a follow-up confirming this.

Here’s an abridged version of what happened, written by Popper himself on the BBC Comedy blog:

Last Monday I decided to do one of my silly and—admittedly—childish phone calls under the guise of my Timewaster Letters character, Robin Cooper.

So I switched on LBC (a London talk radio station) where the topic was Gordon Brown’s alleged bad temper. I called up and got through almost instantly. “What do you want to talk about?” asked the LBC operator. Without time to think I replied, “Gordon Brown visited my place of work and lost his temper right in front of me.” Very soon I was on air, explaining how Gordon Brown had toured my workshop - a “lamination factory”—and thrown a tangerine into one of the machines, breaking it, before calling a member of staff a “citric idiot.”  It was all I could think of at the time. A load of nonsense. But I was quite proud of the phrase, “citric idiot.”

Anyway, skip forward to Friday night. It’s midnight. I’m lying in bed when I get a message on twitter that the tangerine story had been mentioned on BBC Two’s The Bubble. I clicked on iPlayer and fourteen minutes in, I see the brilliant David Mitchell telling his guests that Gordon Brown had allegedly thrown a tangerine into a lamination machine. 

What?! I immediately stuck my phone call up on my site (I’d animated it with my crap drawings), mentioning how it had been picked up on The Bubble. Very soon someone tweeted saying that they’d read about the tangerine incident in the Financial Times. And there was a link! Within seconds, someone else added that it had been in The Telegraph, with the headline: “Gordon Brown accused of throwing a tangerine.” The article went on to say, “One of the factory workers told The Sun Mr. Brown became angry and threw a tangerine he was holding into a laminating machine.”

But my favorite part was when a Hong Kong news agency, which had previously, and bizarrely, animated various incidents of the Brown bullying story, animated my story as well. There it was in black and orange: a sort of man throwing a tangerine into a machine. I laughed so hard, I almost puked my lungs onto my legs. To think that 6000 miles away, a news director in a Hong Kong office had actually instructed one of his animators to show the British Prime Minister throwing a tangerine into a lamination machine. Did the animator have to google ‘lamination machines’ for reference? Actually, the tangerine and the machine looked pretty good, but the factory resembled a sort of over-sized torture chamber.

Popper goes on to write that only the Financial Times was suspicious of the prank, but added “[...] to The Sun and The Telegraph, I just want to let you know that I have another amazing story of the time David Cameron visited the very same factory, and threw a carton of milk into the very same machine, before calling the very same factory worker a “lactic imbecile.”
 

 
Via Xeni Jardin/Boing Boing; cross posting this from Brand X

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.02.2010
06:05 pm
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