I agree with the gist of this post by my friend Caleb Brown. That is, the to-do over Meg Whitman’s lack of a voting history is silly. That said, I hope Whitman’s political career goes nowhere. She did some fairly evil things while heading up eBay, particularly after eBay bought PayPal. Like publicly supporting the arrest and prosecution of online poker players.
David Plotz sings the praises of the sadly canceled NBC series Kings.
Austin police plan to start tracing identities of Internet commenters, arresting and/or suing them.
The 80s were a wonderful time, weren’t they?
Pretty sure this commercial was meant to to be funny. Unfortunately the premise isn’t all that absurd.
So why this is a “fail”?
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on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 9:05 am by Radley Balko
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TheAgitator.com
The SWAT video was a clear fake. No dogs were killed, no stuff was smashed, no shots fired at all.
OT: Regarding the Boston cop beating the guy filming him. You can read the entire complaint in the suit here:
http://www.universalhub.com/images/2009/obrien-complaint.pdf
Not voting does not make one an “absentee citizen.”
Voting is the tiniest part of citizenship.
The 80s were a wonderful time, weren’t they?
Amazing what guys will say and do for sex. Of course, if it were simply legal to buy it…
From the Austin article:
“In a meeting this month with department brass, Acevedo and the group discussed how they think such posts erode public trust in the department and how they have been wrongly maligned.”
Aha! All this time I was under the impression that incidents of perjury, false police statements, unjustified use of force, outright lawlessness, militarization and the wild discrepancies between what gets a civilian convicted/sentenced and what gets a cop convicted/sentenced were the reason public trust in the police is eroding.
No, I obviously have it all wrong: It’s bad guyz on teh intertubez!
Hahahahahha! Austin police don’t like what people are saying about them. And, of course, the first idea that pops into their minds to prevent it is the use of police power. I don’t think for a minute they would limit their investigation to those who might be committing crimes. The reason public trust is being undermined is because they’ve probably never been deserving of public trust to begin with.
Of course, cops aren’t the only ones actively opposed to free expression. The real enemy of the First Amendment is almost everyone in the country. It’s amazing it’s survived this long. Oops. I forgot. It hasn’t.
“Kings” sucked. Seriously, it was a horrible show that deserved to be cancelled. I tried to enjoy it like I did “Deadwood” but the storylines were boring, the dialogue was cheesy, they might as well have been delivering the moral lessons with a sledgehammer and frankly the only actor worth watching in the show was McShane (they didn’t give Eamonn Walker nearly enough screen time).
I agreed with the assessment of one of the posters in the comments of Plotz’s article…”high concept” enough to alienate most of the viewing public but compromised in quality enough by network TV to turn off people who love high-concept shows. Good riddance.
I open a bunch of tabs at the same time so by the time I get to the SWAT commercial I have forgotten that you said it was a commercial. Fortunately, I caught on when the kids at the care center had faces that weren’t blurred out that it was some kind of fake. Still…. too close to reality.
I expected the SWAT team to arrest the people in the first house for resisting arrest, plant pot on the kids in the daycare center and arrest them, and then shoot two and arrest the other two in the last house for illegal gambling.
Re Fail project:
Bottom right corner – black and white rebel flag with a tiny american flag in the middle? wtf?
Kings was a great show that deserved to live on. Instead we now return to our regularly scheduled programming of reality show dreck and Law and Order spinoffs.
UCrawford, probably the reason why it felt so moralizing was that it was (obviously) retelling the story of David and Goliath. The book that the story originally was from has been known to be a bit moralizing from time to time. I didn’t watch much of it, but that said I saw a few episodes and it had some promise. As John Rogers said, though, NBC botched up the marketing. Rather than doing all of their stupid butterfly ads, they could have been far more successful sending a letter to every church in the country saying, “Hey, you know how a lot of people say that TV is all godless sex and drugs? We’re trying to change that, and making a show that might appeal to you and your congregants. Check it out, here it is.” The show was more marketing fail than anything else.
That SWAT joke ad is actually rather offensive in its ignorance. The women playing cards at the end almost seems to be a wink in the direction of questionably legal but not very serious conduct – almost as though this commercial had a meaningful point. Instead it winks in that direction only to say “obviously this isn’t a big deal and no one would ever care.”
Knowing that suspects and officers have been killed due to violent raids of card games, and then seeing exactly that depicted in a spoof commercial is pretty much the definition of offensiveness. Innocent people have died under exactly these circumstances, but we’re going to spoof it and act like it would never happen!
The follow up to the SWAT ad: Nazi extermination camp humor. Sgt Shultz gets shipped to Dachau and hijinks ensue.
If Meg Whitman couldn’t bothered to take an hour or so out of her busy day once a year to even minimally participate in the political process, I think that’s very relevant. Is she really interested in governing and in the political process, or is she just looking to be in charge of?
At the very least, from a political perspective, she has to get out there and ask millions of people to do something that she couldn’t be bothered to do herself, go to the polls and vote. Would your average Joe Republican be all that interesting in voting for someone who couldn’t make time in their busy schedule vote for Ronald Reagan?
1) agree, what’s the fail with the worms in a microwave?
2) the SWAT tape is just unrealistic, although I am perfectly willing to accept that by the 3rd raid the police would be perfectly willing to let the card player go, being more disgusted with dispatch than wanting to go through the paperwork – perhaps one of the SWAT team members would explain to the woman threatening to sue that gambling is illegal and if she sued then the card game would be prosecuted. The 1st one though, completely absurd, the cops would have been on an adrenaline bust and merely because people are old does not mean they cannot be running an illegal arms operation.
I loved Kings. I think NBC threw it under the bus by putting it on Saturday night, which is historically where shows go to die. I always watched it on my laptop later in the week because I’m generally doing something on Saturday evenings.
NBC has had some good shows that got the ax.
Did anyone see Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip? That was an awesome show with Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, and D.L. Hughley where they were part of a fictional sketch comedy show (kind of like SNL). It lasted one season.
What about Journeyman? That featured Kevin McKidd (from Rome and Grey’s Anatomy) as a time traveler who kept going back in time to fix errors and make the present a bit better.
Both of those shows were awesome and they weren’t given a chance to shine.
Guess NBC did it again with Kings.
Okay, since you asked, let’s look at that science project. Why do we do experiments? To test hypotheses about how the physical world works. So my first question would be: what is the hypothesis being tested in the experiment? According to the poster, “that the fattest worm will blow up quickest & blow up more GUTS.” The experiment validated the hypothesis, but what does that tell us? There’s no discussion of the microwave using radiation or how radiation heats objects in the microwave (specifically, no mention of how it selectively heats water molecules). There’s no hypothesis as to WHY fat worms explode more quickly. Without such information, the information gained from the experiment is relevant only to exploding worms in a microwave. Given that such information is pretty much useless, I would consider this a fail.
That SWAT / search engine commercial is awesome! :) Thanks, Radley, for posting it and making my day.
“A lot of my people feel it is time to take these people on,” Acevedo said. “They understand the damage to the organization, and quite frankly, when people are willfully misleading and lying, they are pretty much cowards anyway because they are doing so under the cloak of anonymity.”
King George III was quoted as saying “The time has come for us to uncover the truth about Publius, for he is damaging to the royal character.”
Fail – well, I’m surprised the kid didn’t get arrested for violating various animal-research rules, and his locker searched for cold medicine.
I turned 18 in 1985, but never bothered to cast a vote until 1992. Coming out of the polling area, I saw an old guy, probably a veteran, shuffling towards the building with a cane. I felt like an ass.
I don’t think that one vote makes a difference, and I don’t make a religion out of it. If you miss an election day now and then, that’s no big deal. But, it strikes me as odd that someone wouldn’t bother voting for 10 years and then run for governor.
But, perhaps when you’re a major player, making campaign contributions, the influence of your vote seems not worth the trouble.
Exactly. She did her voting with her checkbook, and it didn’t really matter which candidate won.
On the subject of the television series, Kings, this is just another example of how networks have absolutely no idea of how to market a thoughtful show.
The article makes it sound like I would have really enjoyed it. But, all I saw were the previews, which turned me off completely. It looked like a Nazified America, complete with an Aryan-looking pretty boy in the lead role. It took it to be over-the-top schlock. The ridiculous sounding voice actor the networks use to ratchet up the announcement of every show doesn’t help, either. (I can’t hear the title, *Medium,* without mocking the announcer’s full-throated rasp.)
Maybe the networks are afraid of revealing that there is high concept and literary allusions behind the conception of a show. We “great unwashed” might get turned off by the eggheads.
Meg Whitman’s PayPal is evil. Since they bar any transactions via PayPal that has anything to do with guns, they closed a gun raffle put on for the benefit of Project Valour-IT and Soldiers Angel’s via the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous and The Smallest Minority.
eBay, as you probably know, also bars any transactions having anything to do with legal firearms.
Whitman is the last person I want for governor of California.
Its a fail because it was supposed to be a science project. But all the kid did was microwave some worms to see how long it took for them to blow up. That and the rebel flag indicates its not a science project its just some redneck kid writing down what he does for fun anyway. I mean just read the whole thing, part of his procedure is “smell the worms then see what others think.”
To be fair its more of a teaching fail, because I seriously wonder what teacher would have approved this as the kids project. Did they approve a “cherry bomb in the toilet” project, or a “shove gum in my sisters hair” project?
There was a discussion of the exploding-worm project on Pharyngula a while back; several people speculated that the image in the lower right corner may actually be a size of worm vs time to explode graph, but since it lacks actual units, it’s hard to say.
I have to agree that microwaving worms is a fail, not a good science project, for all the reasons already outlined by ClubMedSix. I’m sure it’s the work of a second or third grader at most (I hope), but I’m also sure the idea of a hypothesis in the form of “I predict X, because Y” could be explained to a kid that age. I’m all for letting kids do actual experiments, but if you can’t come up with a “because Y”, you aren’t doing an “experiment”. I also wonder what teacher would have approved this, and even more so, what kind of parents would have approved it? I sure would never use that microwave again.
“Seconds to bust” is sort of funny, though. In a sick sort of way.
#3 | dave smith — “Voting is the tiniest part of citizenship.”
Broken record alert
Voting is the cornerstone of the democratic State.
Voting is force.
Please do not vote.
“Acevedo and the group discussed how they think such posts erode public trust in the department and how they have been wrongly maligned.”
And wet sidewalks cause rain.
Look, that kid’s not a real scientist, not like Glenn Beck and his frog-boiling water research initiative.
Looks like a comment suggesting the use of proxies and TOR was removed from that article about the Austin cops at statesman.com.
The SWAT video looks like a commercial. Does anyone know what company it is for? The text at the end doesn’t say. It’s similar to the Microsoft Bing commercials. I plan to not use whatever service this was for, and would also like to email the company.
Remember the girl who kicked her shoe off at the King County deputy, and he summarily beat the living shit out of her, with the requisite lie for his version of events, despite video and logic saying otherwise?
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/09/king_county_deputy_fired_for_e.html
Cue job reinstatement in 3 … 2 …
Passaic PD Officer Joseph Rios Indicted after caught on tape beating man on the street for no apparent reason:
http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/state/new_jersey/20090928_ap_njofficerinrecordedbeatingisindicted.html
HuffPo has the video:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/28/joseph-rios-ronnie-hollow_n_302079.html
Per Meg Whitman, look at the due diligence done for Skype. eBay bought Skype, but failed to buy the technology the service depends on. The Skype founders kept that in a shell company. Now they’re suing because eBay wouldn’t sell Skype back to them.
Of course, this only proves that Meg Whitman is just right for government.
Failblog often has things that I don’t think are fails, most commonly signs with double entendres that are pretty obviously intentional.
CC