When Tim Cook published an open letter in September to address iCloud privacy and security concerns, he said free online services treat you, the consumers, as product. Even newcomer Ello, which is dubbed the anti-Facebook, has a manifesto that ends w…
U.S. Air Force men and women fly and maintain some of the most sophisticated aircraft in the world. They do many other things and do them well.
One of them is playing beautiful music, and singing beautifully, as the U.S. Air Force Band recently did — one by one, eventually swelling to more than 100 instrumentalists and vocalists — at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., on December 2.
As they did for the first time last year in Washington D.C. — with tremendous success — the U.S. Air Force Band once again surprised and delighted unsuspecting visitors at the National Air and Space Museum with a holiday-themed concert in the form of a “flash mob.”
The United States Air Force Band performs a holiday flash-mob at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Devon Suits)
Disguised as a special holiday kickoff event, the U.S. Air Force Band began playing an arrangement of “Greensleeves” with a single musician, Technical Sgt. Emily Snyder, who played the English horn.
After several moments of performing solo, Snyder was joined by more than 100 instrumentalists who popped up throughout the crowd, transitioning the song into “What Child Is This,” giving a “surround sound” style performance that charmed guests throughout the museum.
This year’s performance brought together musicians from the Band’s six performing ensembles.
Recalling last year’s “flash mob” success, Chief Master Sgt. Jennifer Pagnard, the Band’s chief of Marketing and Outreach, said, “Airmen musicians performing holiday classics at an iconic museum in the nation’s capital was a winning combination.” She added, “Like many popular videos, it also had the element of surprise, and this year’s video is no different. We hope everyone enjoys it as much as last year’s offering.”
Senior Master Sgt. Bob Kamholz says, “An important part of the Band’s mission is to have a positive impact on the global community on behalf of the U.S. Air Force and the United States of America. With each viral video, the Band garners worldwide attention from the media and on the Internet reaching millions across the globe.”
This latest performance by the Air Force Band is certainly headed that way.
Judge for yourself:
Read more about the background and preparations for this flash mob here
Lead photo: The United States Air Force Band performs a holiday flash mob Dec. 2, 2014, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Devon Suits)
Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu lost to Republican congressman Bill Cassidy in the Louisiana Senate runoff election on Saturday, completing the GOP’s dominance of the Deep South in the upper chamber. The Associated Press called the race not long after polls closed.
The three-term incumbent, who chairs the influential Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, worked hard in the last days of the campaign to bring African American voters to the polls. She also tried, but failed, to convince enough fellow Democrats in voting to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Cassidy’s election is noteworthy in one respect — the state of Louisiana has not been represented by two Republican senators concurrently since 1876. His victory brings the total number of Republicans in the Senate up to 54.
More from HuffPost’s Matt Sledge:
Most of Landrieu’s problems are not unique. Senate Democrats everywhere had a miserable Election Night in November. President Barack Obama’s low approval rating has hurt his fellow party members as Republicans have sought to “nationalize” the election.
Cassidy has hammered at Landrieu’s 97 percent support for Obama in the Senate.
“I represent Louisiana. She represents Barack Obama,” Cassidy said on a recent phone call, according to Politico.
Landrieu actually won a plurality of votes in the election’s first round in November. But because Louisiana uses an unusual “jungle primary” system, she now faces Cassidy alone — without tea party Republican Rob Maness drawing off votes on the right.
Landrieu has been at pains to emphasize that with the Senate now firmly in Republican hands, the race is no longer a national referendum on Obama. “What is still left to be decided is who is best qualified to represent this state for six more years in the United States Senate,” she said at a campaign event on Tuesday, according to The New York Times.
But a last-ditch effort to distance herself from national Democrats — with a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline — failed by one vote last month, undermining Landrieu’s longstanding claim to posses more clout than Cassidy would as a freshman senator.
In the final weeks of the election, Landrieu has sought to rally her base among women and African-Americans, and to suggest that Cassidy was paid for hours he did not work as a doctor at Louisiana State University.
Unfortunately, for Landrieu, black votes were down by 17,600 in early voting for the runoff, a likely sign that Landrieu’s last-minute gambit is not working. With white voters turning against Democrats everywhere in the South — including Louisiana — in the last 20 years, she has few other bases to turn to.
“I’m going to fight for the people of my state until the day I leave,” Landrieu said after the Keystone bill failed. But she seemed to recognize just how dire her situation was with her next words: “I hope that will not be soon.”
The CarPlay interface is undoubtedly better for using while driving than the regular ‘ole screen. But unless you’ve got a shiny new car (or one of the expensive aftermarket dashes), chances are you don’t have anything to pair your iPhone with. But this tweak gives you an idea of what CarPlay would look like running on just your handset.
The hackers that stole sensitive data from Sony Pictures have sent out an email to the company’s employees, threatening them and their families, according to Variety. “We thought the worst was over,” a Sony source told Deadline. After all, the perpet…
By Lisa Richwine and Jim Finkle
LOS ANGELES/BOSTON (Reuters) – The forensics experts who Sony Corp hired to investigate the massive cyberattack at its Hollywood studio told the company that the breach was “unprecedented in nature,” according to a letter obtained by Reuters.
Kevin Mandia, the top executive at FireEye Inc’s Mandiant forensics unit, made the comment in a letter to Michael Lynton, the head of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE).
Lynton forwarded that message to his employees on Saturday, saying that the note was “helpful in understanding the nature of what we are dealing with.”
Mandia, whose forensics firm has probed some of the biggest and most sophisticated cyberattacks known to date, told Lynton in his email that “The scope of this attack differs from any we have responded to in the past, as its purpose was to both destroy property and release confidential information to the public.”
He added in the email that “The bottom line is that this was an unparalleled and well planned crime, carried out by an organized group, for which neither SPE nor other companies could have been fully prepared.”
NEW YORK — As rain poured down in New York City on Saturday afternoon, more than 50 protesters gathered at the Louis Pink Houses, the Brooklyn housing project where a police officer shot and killed an unarmed man last month. The New York Police Department has called the shooting of 28-year-old Akai Gurley an accident.
To keep dry, the protesters huddled under a red tent at the entrance to the building where Gurley was killed. Protesters chanted “We are all Akai Gurley” and “From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” They held yellow signs that read “Jail Killer Cops” and “Fists Up, Fight Back.”
Rosetta Jordan, 65, lives in the neighborhood. She said Gurley’s death enraged but didn’t surprise her. “That’s become the norm here. All you can do is pray for your kids and pray for yourself,” she said.
Someone should be punished for killing Gurley, Jordan said. “That was someone’s son. You can’t just take a life like that.”
She doesn’t trust the cops, she said, because they harass everyone. “They harass the children. They harass people for sitting in a bench. You can’t even sit down on a bench — it’s like a prison. They send cops out here that don’t know the community, so they’re frightened and the community is frightened,” she said. “The cops are supposed to be there to help us, but instead they’re killing us.”
Gurley’s wake was held on Friday, just days after a grand jury on Staten Island chose not to indict a police officer on charges in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. That decision, along with a similar decision in the Michael Brown case in Missouri, touched off widespread protests in New York and elsewhere. The three men all died at the hands of police officers; the three men were all black.
On Friday, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson announced that he would impanel a grand jury to consider charges against Officer Peter Liang, the rookie cop who shot Gurley. That came on the heels of a report in the New York Daily News alleging that Liang had texted his union representative, rather than call for help, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
Alex Salazar, a former officer with the Los Angeles Police Department and current private investigator, was one of the protesters at the Pink Houses on Saturday. He said he had come to New York to show solidarity.
“I’m an ex-pig,” Salazar told the crowd. “I was in the 1992 riots. I saw the city of Los Angeles almost burn down because people were tired of this.”
Victoria Phillips, 34, who goes by Miss V., used to live nearby. She said that three days before Gurley was killed, she had blogged about being searched in the area. She spoke to the crowd through a bullhorn.
“That officer had his gun out, hand on the trigger because he’s scared of black people,” she said, conjuring the scene on the day Gurley died. “They can call it an accident, but I’m going to call it what it was. … They say he heard some noises and got scared. Well, he was in a residential hall. What the hell did he expect?”
She claimed that police are scared now because they don’t know where the next protest will pop up.
“They are scared, they are terrorized,” she said, referring to the police. “Why? Because they don’t know what the f**k to expect. We gotta keep it up.”
I’ve been thinking lately about the persistently vituperative and insulting attacks on President Obama since 2008. It is, of course, commonplace in American politics for presidents to be lambasted for their policies, their programs, their values, and even their personal quirks. Sometimes the tone crosses the line. John Adams was accused by a political opponent of “swallowing up” every “consideration of the public welfare . . . in a continual grasp for power.” James Madison was demeaned as “Little Jemmy,” because he was short. James Buchanan, who once declared that workers should get by on a dime a day, came to be mocked as “Ten Cents Jimmy.”
John Tyler, who assumed the presidency after the death of William Henry Harrison, was ridiculed as “His Accidency.” Congressman Abraham Lincoln castigated President James K. Polk as a “completely bewildered man.” Opponents of Woodrow Wilson’s reinstitution of the draft in World War I accused him of “committing a sin against humanity.” Critics of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal attacked him as an “un-American radical.” Richard Nixon was famously known as “Tricky Dick,” and of course he was not “A Crook.” At the height of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson was excoriated by his opponents as a “Murderer” and a “War Criminal.”
But no president in our nation’s history has ever been castigated, condemned, mocked, insulted, derided, and degraded on a scale even close to the constantly ugly attacks on President Obama. From the day he assumed office – indeed, even before he assumed office – he was subjected to unprecedented insults in often the most hateful terms.
He has been accused of being born in Kenya, of being a “secret Muslim,” of being complicit with the Muslim Brotherhood, of wearing a ring bearing a secret verse from the Koran, of having once been a Black Panther, of refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance, of seeking to confiscate all guns, of lying about just about everything he has ever said, ranging from Benghazi to the Affordable Care Act to immigration, of faking bin Laden’s death, and of funding his campaigns with drug money. It goes on and on and on. Even the President’s family is treated by his political enemies with disrespect and disdain.
If one browses even respectable websites, one can readily find bumper stickers, coffee cups, and tee-shirts for sale with such messages as: “Dump This Turd” (with an image of President Obama); “Coward! You Left Them To Die in Benghazi” (with an image of President Obama); “Somewhere in Kenya A Village Is Missing Its Idiot” (with an image of President Obama); “Islam’s Trojan Horse” (with an image of President Obama); “Pure Evil” (with an image of President Obama); “I’m Not A Racist: I Hate His White Half Too” (with an image of President Obama); “He Lies!” (with an image of President Obama); and on and on and on.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Every one of these messages is protected by the First Amendment, and people have a right to express their views, even in harsh, offensive, cruel, and moronic ways. We the People do not need to trust or admire our leaders, and we should not treat them with respect if we don’t feel they deserve our respect. But the sheer vituperation directed at this President goes beyond any rational opposition and is, quite frankly, mind-boggling.
In part, of course, this might just be a product of our times. Perhaps the quality of our public discourse has sunk so low that any public official must now expect such treatment. Perhaps any president elected in 2008 would have been greeted with similar scorn and disdain. But, to be honest, that seems unlikely.
Of course, there are those who say that this phenomenon is due in part, perhaps in large part, to the fact that President Obama is African-American. But surely racism is dead in America today, right?
One fact that might lend some credence to the theory that racism has something to do with the tenor of the attacks on President Obama is that only one other president in our history has been the target of similar (though more subdued) personal attacks.
In his day, this president was castigated by the press and his political opponents as a “liar,” a “despot,” a “usurper,” a “thief,” a “monster,” a “perjurer,” an “ignoramus,” a “swindler,” a “tyrant,” a “fiend,” a “coward,” a “buffoon,” a “butcher,” a “pirate,” a “devil,” and a “king.” He was charged with being “cunning,” “thickheaded,” “heartless,” “filthy,” and “fanatical.” He was accused of behaving “like a thief in the night,” of being “the miserable tool of traitors and rebels,” and of being “adrift on a current of racial fanaticism.” He was labeled by his enemies “Abraham Africanus the First.”
But, of course, race had nothing to do with it then, either.
I’m not so naïve or recalcitrant as to deny the fact that the surest way to wreck the American economy–to take it from whatever point it sits at today and send it straight into the abyss–is for us consumers to voluntarily go on a six-month austerity kick, a period during which we don’t buy anything except stuff we actually “need.” Not stuff we “want,” mind you, or stuff that will make us materially happier or more comfortable, but stuff we truly need.
During this six-month period, we consumers would get our cars repaired instead of buying new ones; we would hold off buying new shoes, new shirts, new jackets, new toys for the kids, new jewelry, new gadgets for the kitchen; we would hold off buying better TVs, better stereos, better phones, and better computers. For a period of six months, we would stick with what we have; unless something was actually broken and no longer worked, we would make do with what we already own.
Basically, we would stop buying everything except food and necessary supplies. Then we would stand back in awe and watch the economy implode. Watch it crumble. Watch it crumble the way Tokyo crumbled when Godzilla went wild on its ass. Again, I’m just talking here. While I’m not so self-destructive as to want to see anything resembling this scenario actually happen, I confess that there are times when our devotion to naked, unbridled commerce makes me want to puke.
I was recently reminded of my gag reflex when I attempted to play a DVD I had received as a birthday gift. I’ve watched enough VHS tapes and DVDs to know that these movie companies won’t allow you to fast-forward through their slimy disclaimers and ominous threats. You have no choice but to watch them.
Their threats are dire. They warn you that even if you do something as innocuous as make a free copy for your cousin, you lay yourself open to having Interpol put you in prison for five years, and fine you $250,000. I’ve come to accept the unhappy fact that the filmmakers have the right to force you to watch these messages, no matter how many times you’ve seen them; no matter if you’ve seen them enough times to have memorized them.
But the good news was that you could always fast-forward through the obnoxious advertisements that followed–the previews for films available from the same studio. If you didn’t want to watch half a dozen trailers for teenage horror movies that you had no intention of seeing, you could either fast-forward through them, one at a time, or jump to the menu and hit the “play movie” option. They could force you to watch the warnings, but they couldn’t force you to watch the commercials. Until now.
My new DVD not only wouldn’t let me fast-forward through the trailers or jump to the menu, the son of a bitch wouldn’t even let me shut off the DVD and hit the fast-forward button with the movie not playing. In other words, as a slave to “commerce,” I was being forced to watch these commercials. And this was a DVD that had been bought and paid for. It wasn’t a rental. I owned it now. Yet I didn’t have the authority to say no. It made me want to puke.
David Macaray is a playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor”)
At the 2014 Grammy Awards show, fast-food chain Arby’s trended on Twitter when it poked fun at rapper Pharrell Williams. His hat looked like the one in the Arby’s logo, so the company tweeted, “Hey, #Pharrell, can we have our hat back?” It was one of the most talked-about moments of the show because it reminded people of pop-culture totems, including Smokey Bear and Harry Potter.
While the move inspired 77,000 re-tweets within 24 hours, there’s little evidence those tweets led the company to sell more roast beef sandwiches.
Yes, new technology platforms are available, but that doesn’t mean companies should abandon common sense as they build their brands. In my new book, Twitter is Not a Strategy: Rediscovering the Art of Brand Marketing, I argue the ABCs of marketing are as true today as they were during the Mad Men era. And so-called traditional media is here to stay.
Too many businesses lunge toward the latest app or social media stunt without considering their identity as a brand, and how their media strategy works. In the process, consumers end up confused and detached.
There are two truths necessary to forge a brand for both new and old media:
First, when we shop, our brand preference is typically shaped by “traditional media,” while our engagement and loyalty to a brand is more likely influenced by digital media. Despite the proliferation of smartphones and other digital devices, the 30-second broadcast television commercial continues to rule (and increase) – even in the United States.
Manufacturers spent some $67 billion on network and cable advertising in 2013 how does this compare to previous spending? How much of a rise? Also, can you cite where this number comes from? While this suggest that companies still think television ads are still a wise investment, digital media is more likely to increase the probability of purchase and repurchases because it effectively triggers behavioral changes, such as learning more, using more, buying more, and advocating more.
Second, communications must be unified across all media by a consistent “brand idea” — a long-term relationship between consumers and brands that remains consistent over time. It’s a product’s soul, invisible but always there.
Some brands get it. For instance, Coca-Cola transcends the goal of quenching thirst to present “moments of happiness” across all types of media — digital and traditional. In 2013, the soft drink maker created “Small World” vending machines featuring streaming live video feeds that encouraged citizens of India and Pakistan, countries divided by decades of hostility, to share some semblance of happiness. Whether you agree with it or not, the delivery is powerful. Coke sought to narrow the political divide by showing small gestures of humanity, such as a wave or a short dance.
Nike is another example. Its brand loyalty didn’t appear out of thin air or drip from a Twitter feed, but rather from the vision of Phil Knight, the athletic apparel company’s cofounder and CEO. ‘Just do it’ isn’t just a slogan, but a call to participate in sports. In recent years, Nike has found ways to update the slogan through the Nike+ digital ecosystem, which leverages new technology, such as wearables, to infuse an “always on” dynamic into our daily lives and transform solitary sporting activities into competitive group activities. Further, multi-channel platforms ranging from Australia’s “She Run the Night” campaign to a series of global “Tournament of Basketball Champions” events have reinvented ‘Just do it’ from a brand proposition into high-involvement experiences.
Now is the time to cross today’s “digital-traditional divide.” Only a definitive brand idea ensures long-term consistency, and creates order from the chaos that spreads across an ever-shifting media landscape.
This article was adapted from a recent commentary published on Fortune.com. Please follow me at twitter.com/TomDoctoroff
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
