Thursday, June 30, 2011

The Game -- Armed Thugs Hit Music Video Set

This seems fishy to me. How would some "thugs" (i use that term loosely) know that you all are doing a video shoot? Some one had to have tipped them off! Also why in the hell would a producer(who don't need to be on a video set any way) be caring around $2000 dollars in his wallet? For what?  People ... you need to do better... where is the professionalism in the making of a music video anymore? this just don't sound right to me.....




The Game -- Armed Thugs Hit Music Video Set

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

70% of people polled said that they wish they had darker skin, fuller lips and curvier bodies!!!!!! now why is that not surprising to me?

(CNN) -- Can beauty be defined by age, gender, color, body shape or size? Who gets to decide?
Multibillion-dollar beauty and fashion industries both shape and depend on the cult-like worship of what physical attributes the public sees as beautiful. And most women feel the effects of those decisions.
The photo exhibition "Beauty Culture" at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, with 175 pictures by iconic photographers, is aimed at starting people thinking and talking about female beauty. It also peeks into the underbelly of the beauty industry, including its relation to celebrity, plastic surgery, the faux-perfection of airbrushing of advertising and even child beauty pageants.
There are a lot of hot-button issues as to how the media and the beauty and fashion worlds depict whole groups of people, why they show them in a particular way or barely notice them at all.
However, there's been a major shift when it comes to diversity in beauty advertising and magazine beauty editorial spreads.
Supermodel Veronica Webb, L'Oreal's corporate diversity director Jean-Claude Le Grand, fashion insider Bethann Hardison, Marie Claire's beauty editor Erin Flaherty and others share their thoughts on the evolving and increasingly inclusive take on gorgeousness.
America's changing definition of beautiful
Several studies suggest that many equate beauty with symmetry, but even within that equation, "Each time has its own standard (of beauty)," said photographer Melvin Sokolsky during his lecture at the Annenberg.
View more than 30 former Miss USA Pageant queens
A photographer, an editor or a casting director may be subject to his or her personal predilections of what beauty is and foist them upon the public, leading entire societal likes and dislikes to shift, too.
And that standard in America is changing rapidly. Today, the number of marriages between people of different ethnicities is surging. Back in 1993, Time magazine's cover story "The New Face of America," featuring a computer generated face consisting of a mix of several ethnicities, is indeed more in line with what most of us now consider beautiful, according to Allure's 20th Anniversary Beauty Survey. "Sixty-four percent of all our respondents think women of mixed race represent the epitome of beauty," the survey says.
And of those respondents who said they wished to change their skin color, "70% reported that they wanted it to be darker." Full lips and curvy bodies are also coveted.
That's a far cry from 1991 when most Allure respondents chose blonde haired, blue-eyed Christie Brinkley as the ideal beauty. The all-American look today is much more of a hybrid.
One model's story
Model, writer and television personality Veronica Webb (former co-host of "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style" on Bravo) experienced this transition from the front lines of the beauty industry.
Although Beverly Johnson was the first African-American on the cover of Vogue in 1974, Webb was the first African-American to win a major cosmetics campaign when she signed on with Revlon in 1992.
"For me personally it was like almost the impossible dream of the fashion industry," says Webb of her Revlon campaign. "The biggest reward, the most money you could make, the highest level of commercial validation. And you know a barrier -- a real barrier, a glass ceiling that existed forever -- got broken.
"And the ideal of beauty, and who represents beauty, and what beautiful is changed so quickly and so radically right after that, that by the time I had my children they can't even recognize the world of fashion and beauty that I came up in."
Webb says that in any business when you qualify and can perform on every level, "but you're rejected out of hand because of your skin color ... not even your skin color, but the perception of your 'race,' there's nothing more frustrating than that," says Webb.
But today there's a whole spectrum of women who've helmed beauty campaigns from blonde to brunette, from fair skinned to deep, including celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Freida Pinto, Eva Mendes, Taylor Swift, Kerry Washington, Aishwarya Rai, Drew Barrymore, Gwen Stefani and models such as Liu Wen, Liya Kebede, Christy Turlington and Adriana Lima.
A global perspective = good business
Time has shown the beauty industry that embracing a world of beauty isn't just good karma, it's also good for the bottom line.
"For us, the more you are diverse, the more you are successful," says Le Grand. L'Oreal Group is the world's largest beauty company and includes 23 international brands, including L'Oreal Paris, Lancôme, Maybelline and Garnier.
If you are to be a leader, Le Grand says that you have to understand "there is a link between beauty and diversity." And that includes understanding the vision of beauty in places such as China, India, Africa and Europe as well the United States.
"If it's only one vision of beauty and not a diverse one, you are out. ... We have to reflect everyone from the model to the employee."
Flaherty, Marie Claire's beauty editor who also once worked at Jane, says that she's been lucky to work at magazines that are all about a global perspective, diversity and unusual beauty.
Diversity, of course, can be expresses a myriad of ways, be it featuring women with freckles, who are curvier or who are 45 and older.
An element in the beauty world that changed things, "was the Dove campaign," says Flaherty. "Using many different types of models and reflecting what women really look like."
The campaign's stated goal is to "free ourselves and the next generation from beauty stereotypes" and contribute to building self-esteem for young women and others through marketing campaigns featuring women of different shapes, sizes, ages and hues as well as partnering with groups such as the National Eating Disorders Information Center and the Girl Scouts.
Bethann Hardison has been a model, modeling agent and recently Vogue Italia editor-at-large.
"I'm an advocate of the fashion model," says Hardison, who laments models losing jobs to actors and singers.
But she does see big changes in advertising in that it better reflects American demographics.
Hardison points out that the beauty industry has a large consumer base, speaks to a broader group of people, and so is more democratic and shifts faster than the fashion world.
But as the global economy shifts, so too will fashion with the help of newspaper editors who call out inequities and magazine editors, casting directors, advertising agencies and designers committed to inclusiveness, as well as the public.
"The word beauty is such a controversial word," says Hardison. "I think that the more that there's exposure (of different kinds of looks), and as long as you expose them consistently, you give people a chance to see what could also be beautiful besides what came before."
The "Beauty Culture" exhibition opened May 21 and runs through November 27.

The aliens here yall!!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/06/29/giant.squid.found.WPTV?&hpt=hp_c2

Grown ups if you have not read this book check this out... hilarious for real!!

Adam Mansbach was at home and supposed to be working on a book. He just couldn’t get his daughter Vivien, 2, to go to sleep.
The Rutgers University professor and author had conquered the art of the novel, become intimately familiar with the rhyme schemes of rap, withstood the rigor of a master’s program in creative writing and demonstrated the skill required to teach in one. But he had no answer to this problem.
“Look out for my forthcoming book, ‘Go the F--- to Sleep,’ ” he barked on Facebook, instead of speaking this aloud to his innocent babe, which was probably all for the best. The post got “liked” and commented on by friends, spurring Mansbach to actually pursue the idea.
Out today, his book, “Go the F--- to Sleep” (Akashic Books) is an ode to childhood insomnia and ensuing parental frustration. Now Mansbach, 34, who isn’t at Rutgers anymore but is still writing, finds his book at No. 2 on the Amazon sales list, based on preorders. About a month ago it hit No. 1, and has spent 50 days in the Top 100. One especially enthusiastic, early reader (the book’s proofs were leaked) posted a dramatic reading to YouTube. Mansbach’s story has also been optioned for a movie to Fox. All that after he managed to produce the text for the book in what he says was about “two sittings.”
READ PARENTAL GUIDANCE BLOGGER JOAN OLIVER EMMER'S TAKE
Its whimsical pages may change in scenery, but all have one thing in common: They end with a plea from the narrator for the child listening to “Go the f--- to sleep” (or a similar variation on the sentiment). The expletive in the title and others are sprinkled throughout the book with abandon. One page depicts a snoring heap of lions blissfully at rest. A baby peeks over a sleeping beast’s mane with a dastardly smile.
“How is it that you can do all this other great (things)/But you can’t lie the f--- down and sleep?” Mansbach writes.
Despite the obvious taboo involved, there have been few F-word related setbacks, says Mansbach. Target said it would carry the book as long as it was shrink-wrapped. Wal-Mart, however, will not. A G-rated version for kids is in the works, he says.
“I wanted to riff on this whole genre of bedtime books,” says Mansbach, his weariness of the format apparent in his inability to name a favorite, or even a most hated bedtime book: “They all frankly kind of blur together for me.”
adammansbach.jpgDespite the obvious taboo involved, there have been few F-word related setbacks, says Mansbach. Target said it would carry the book as long as it was shrink-wrapped. Wal-Mart, however, will not. A G-rated version for kids is in the works, he says.
Tonight Mansbach will promote the book at the New York Public Library, which has advertised his work as “a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world.” There will be a talk “on children, sleep deprivation and insomnia.”
Lauren Grodstein was director of the MFA program when Mansbach was on staff at Rutgers-Camden last year.
She identifies her own nightly routine in what she calls Mansbach’s “flow of exasperation,” that of a perturbed parent who, as the storybook progresses, grows increasingly rageful, insecure and even despondent.
“The giant pangolins of Madagascar are snoozing/As I lie here and openly weep/Sure, fine, whatever, I’ll bring you some milk. Who the f--- cares? You’re not gonna sleep.” The pangolin (a scaly type of anteater), Mansbach explains, is his daughter’s favorite animal.
“It says what everybody thinks, but no one is allowed to say,” says Grodstein of the book, noting a parallel between the subversive bedtime story and Mansbach’s interest in hip-hop. “A lot of successful hip-hop rides on saying the truth, even when the truth isn’t that appealing,” says Grodstein.
No stranger to rhyme schemes — bedtime or not — Mansbach applied his passion for hip-hop culture to the curriculum at Rutgers, teaching the class “Popular Culture: Hip-Hop.”
Grodstein met Mansbach while the two were students at Columbia’s MFA program. Now parents of children who are just months apart, the bedtime blues was a source of commiseration for them at Rutgers. As Grodstein puts it, “I could go downstairs and have a glass of wine or read a Richard Scarry book 3,000 times.”
“Go the F--- to Sleep” illustrator Ricardo Cortés has known Mansbach since the two were high school students — and amateur MCs — ­in Newton, Mass.
“He nailed the parody,” says Cortés, 37, whose other work includes “It’s Just a Plant,” a children’s book about marijuana that he intended to be a way of “igniting a discussion” about children inevitably encountering the topic of drugs, he says. To illustrate Mansbach’s book with different impish faces, he called on friends with kids to provide lifelike expressions ranging from tickled to quiver-lipped.

BofA in $8.5 billion mortgage settlement - Jun. 29, 2011

OK now can Bank of America please return some of those ridiculous overdraft fees that they have charged people also?



BofA in $8.5 billion mortgage settlement - Jun. 29, 2011

David Duchovny and Tea Leoni -- Separated

Duhhh! Like we didn't see this coming. I mean the man claimed he was a sex addict! smh... 


David Duchovny and Tea Leoni -- Separated

Rick Ross Accused in Gruesome Doggy Death

 Oh so that's "Rick Ross's" real name.   poor pooch!

Rick Ross Accused in Gruesome Doggy Death

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Now aint this some Bull@#$%! SMH...Why does it have to be the end when I'm alive and well... What do you think?

008

As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.

In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010

MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
[Prof. Panarin]
Igor Panarin
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.
"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."
At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.
Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.
For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.
The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
[Igor Panarin]
Write to Andrew Osborn at andrew.osborn@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit
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More In World

When the checks stop coming in ... This NFL lock out is something serious!

NFL Player Turned Substitute Teacher

by ayvaunnpenn on June 27, 2011
by Ayvaunn Penn, Your Black World
It is not common to hear of NFL players leaving the league and taking on the role of teacher, but that is exactly what David Bruton of the Denver Broncos did. According to reports from NPR.org he has become ”a substitute social studies and math teacher at Jane Chance Elementary School and Miamisburg High School (his alma mater) in Ohio” while the NFL “works through its lockout.”
While in the classroom, Bruton’s presence and interaction with students paints a more positive picture of black sports players than is usually reported by the media. He says, “an athlete is not just a bad guy who happens to have a big checkbook. Some guys have a lot of heart and desire, and stuff that they’re made of [and] are different from what people see.”
Referring to teachers as “the guiding source of youth,” this NFL player takes his new-found leadership position in the classroom seriously. He does not merely teach from behind a podium or desk. He says he goes around the classroom “helping them (students) out individually.” He adds that “you’re constantly using your brain, especially teaching stuff that you — in my position — haven’t done in six years.” Bruton, however, is not one of those substitute teachers who is content to be rusty on material he or she needs to teach. He says, “I [am] definitely in the books, on my iPad looking up how to figure out quadratic equations and finding out angles.” Bruton definitely sounds like the black male teacher desperately needed in the scholastic world. Maybe he will be able to positively impact the lives of at least a few black students and inspire them to do great things.
This is a part of Ayvaunn Penn‘s Black And Making It series. She is also a spoken word artist and an award winning writer completing her degree in English and philosophy. For more of her witty-word works click here. To have your original poetry featured by Ms. Penn on Your Black Poets, click here.

Sweet Ga Brown: . Ok ladies, I am going to need yall to get it tog...

Sweet Ga Brown: . Ok ladies, I am going to need yall to get it tog...: "Fake Babies, Fake Lives By Dr. Keith Ablow Published June 28, 2011 | FoxNews.com Print Ema..."

. Ok ladies, I am going to need yall to get it together!!! Pure Insanity

Fake Babies, Fake Lives

Published June 28, 2011
| FoxNews.com
According to recent news reports, elaborate fake babies—called “reborn dolls”—are becoming popular with adult women. 
The dolls, which can cost more than $12,000 (but often sell for several hundred or a few thousand dollars)—have extremely realistic hair and incredibly lifelike facial features and skin tone, thanks to many hours spent by artists who paint them, complete with one-of-a-kind birthmarks—and painstakingly apply their locks and lashes. Some of the dolls are made to look exactly like premature babies and delivered with an incubator and even with IVs.
Some younger women claim the dolls satisfy their maternal needs. Some middle-aged women claim the dolls comfort them as their children leave for college. Indeed, companies will supply custom-made dolls that closely resemble a woman’s own baby—born twenty years before.
It would be one thing if women were buying “reborn dolls” out of morbid curiosity or a passion to collect them (like Hummel figurines). But women are taking their dolls out in strollers (no kidding) and strapping them into car seats for trips to the mall. Fortunately, they don’t actually believe their “babies” are real. That would be a true psychotic delusion. But they are able to suspend disbelief and play with them as though they are real—kind of like believing in a movie while you are watching it..
While this may seem like a harmless fad, when taken with other evidence that we prefer fantasy to fact, I see this as the latest symptom that our species is losing its grip on reality, in a wholesale fashion. Increasingly, we are loath to accept our own life stories, and work through the inevitable painful chapters, in order to achieve real personal growth. People who are dissatisfied with who they are can now pretend they are entirely different people on secondlife.com. Children who might otherwise have to establish real relationships with pets, can adopt animated ones on clubpenguin.com.
Teenagers who haven’t seen the world at all can wear tee-shirts from trendy retailers emblazoned with logos of hotels and restaurants in exotic, far-off locales (hotels and restaurants which, by the way, may not even exist). Many millions of people can sterilize their life stories into Facebook profiles and each effortlessly gather hundreds or thousands of “friends” (not one of whom need necessarily be a genuine friend, at all). Politicians who choose not to address real threats to our economy can print money and prop up failed or fledgling industries. And, now, women who might have integrated the end of their childbearing years (or their inability to ever have children) into their self concepts and found new ways of truly expressing themselves, can dodge that journey by ordering fake babies and “nurturing” them.
“Reborn dolls,” seen this way, are closer to drugs than they are to collectibles. Like street drugs, they reduce anxiety by substituting an illusion. But, like every anesthetic, they only delay the inevitable reckoning with anxieties everyone must face. A woman who uses a fake baby to treat questions she has about her value as a human being after her childbearing years is actually dodging those questions. And, like every artificial way of avoiding discomfort, nurturing a fake baby will only increase that discomfort, in the longer run.
Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team. Dr. Ablow can be reached at info@keithablow.com. His team of Life Coaches can be reached at lifecoach@keithablow.com.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/06/28/fake-babies-fake-lives/#ixzz1Qb1GJvPM

Monday, June 27, 2011