In 2015, John Carpenter called They Live “a documentary.” Though his cult classic is nearly 30 years old, its themes of surveillance, income inequality, and the sinking suspicion that the people in charge are way more sinister than we ever realized still feel very potent. A new short doc examines why.
AUSTIN, Texas ― Critics deride Infowars provocateur Alex Jones as a vitriolic conspiracy theorist with an odd penchant for disrobing when he’s on air. But when he took the witness stand here on Wednesday, he was a calm, concerned parent with his shirt tightly buttoned.
The jury heard the cult radio star’s gravely voice for the first time in a child custody trial that attracted national media attention after his lawyers described his angry on-air persona as little more than “political satire.”
That argument, repeated multiple times in the courtroom, appeared to undermine his image as a bombastic flamethrower known for loudly peddling baseless conspiracies that sometimes make their way onto the Twitter feed of President Donald Trump. But it helps defend him against accusations from attorneys for his ex-wife Kelly that his venom-fueled tirades discredit him as a father.
It remains unclear whether the antics he’s known for on the radio will impact the jury’s view of his parenting. In questioning from Randall Wilhite, one of his lawyers, Jones recited all his children’s hobbies and described their performance in school and family life while joyful pictures of him and his children flashed from a projector. The images featured them rambling along the city’s hike-and-bike trail, making Christmas decorations and trekking atop Enchanted Rock, a nearby state park.
He described his son as more handsome and talented than himself, his daughters more intelligent and artistic. “All three of my children are the next level,” Jones said. “It’s a real blessing from God.”
Lawyers for his ex-wife have argued that bringing his teenage son on air for Infowars segments amounts to indoctrination into what they describe as an offensive and spiteful ideology that has already led to death threats against the son.
But Jones said his son pitched his own stories focusing on “PG-style topics,” like whether private space exploration is superior to government-run efforts, or the importance of not littering on the Greenbelt, a public hiking space that runs through the city of Austin, Texas. The young man only participates out of his own interest, Jones said.
“He’s done some great reports for us,” Jones said of his son. “That’s what he wants. He’s always saying it’s what he wants to do professionally.”
Jones confirmed the death threats and said he’s reported them to police, who he said told him he didn’t have a reason to fear for his kids. The children are protected by some of the same the security personnel who have defended former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former President George W. Bush, Jones said. He has held primary custody of the three children for the last 30 months.
Opposing lawyers lobbed accusations at Jones Wednesday ranging from attacks on his parenting to bizarre episodes that perhaps cast more doubt on his character and composure than his fathering skills.
The case manager who handled the custody issues during his divorce, Dr. Alissa Sherry, said a therapist diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder, a difficult condition to treat that can impact his sense of empathy. He initially declined treatment, but eventually sought therapy, she said.
Bobby Newman, an attorney for Kelly Jones, insinuated that an episode in which Alex Jones allegedly yelled at his daughter to remove a boot to protect her foot after a fracture amounted to negligence. Alex Jones’ aggressive insistence that the fracture was small enough to walk on with regular shoes contradicted the doctor’s orders, but Sherry denied that it amounted to negligence.
Sherry confirmed that in one instance during a therapy session with his children present, Alex Jones took his shirt off for unexplained reasons. Newman asked how many times she’d seen that happen in her professional career.
“I suppose just once,” Sherry said. “I don’t remember the context of it, but it’s a rare thing to happen in a therapy session.”
Sherry appeared to offer a much harsher assessment of Kelly Jones. The Austin psychologist described the children’s mother as suffering instances of “emotional dysregulation” ― an inability to control the intensity of her emotions. Sherry said that ailment had led her to recommend less frequent contact with the children until she had brought herself under control through therapy.
I don’t remember the context of it, but it’s a rare thing to happen in a therapy session.
Psychologist Alissa Sherry, describing the time radio host Alex Jones took his shirt off during a family therapy session
Lawyers for Alex Jones rolled a roughly 40-minute video of an interview with her personal therapist in depositions that reflected her assessment. The therapist said Kelly Jones distrusted the case manager, and eventually went on to view him with suspicion and threatened to challenge his professional license. Robert Hoffman, an attorney for Kelly Jones, said they may call her former therapist as a witness in the trial.
While Alex Jones’ initial appearance as a witness Wednesday seemed to bode well for his trial, he’s struggled to reconcile his new public image as a sensitive family man with his professional persona as an enraged conservative who does things such as flippantly and baselessly questioning the paternity of former President Barack Obama’s children.
In seeming disregard of a gag order preventing him from discussing the trial outside the courtroom, he posted a video on Infowars Tuesday accusing the media of maligning him as a disingenuous performance artist ― a characterization based on the description provided in court by own his legal team.
“What? I didn’t say that,” Jones says in the video. “And they show an image like I’m being arrested like they always do.”
“This is the type of deception that’s going on,” he added. “They play these semantical lawyer games, ladies and gentlemen. It’s ridiculous. We’re defending the Republic. We’re defending the border. We’re defending the Second Amendment. They don’t like us because we are able to get a talking point out that’s true, and the system wants a monopoly of control over news and the information. That’s why they lie and say we’re fake news.”
Attorneys for Kelly Jones attempted to raise the issue of the gag order in the courtroom Tuesday morning, but the judge cut them short, asking lawyers for both sides to approach the bench. They spoke in hushed tones, but one of Kelly Jones’ lawyers spoke loudly enough to make it clear that he intended to censure the radio show host for Tuesday’s video segment.
A gag order is perhaps a cruel fate for a man who’s made a profession out of shouting outrageous things at inappropriate times. But even without uttering a word, Alex Jones managed to get under the skin of his ex-wife’s lawyers. While conferring with the judge and opposing counsel, Hoffman pointed a finger at Jones, suddenly raising his voice to say: “He shakes his head and glares at me!” Hoffman repeated the outburst a moment later. “And again he’s shaking his head and smirking at me!” he said, once again pointing a finger at Jones.
Travis County Judge Orlinda Naranjo had told Jones twice on Tuesday to refrain from gesturing or risk getting tossed out of the courtroom. He was admonished a third time after Hoffman’s remarks.
Naranjo declined to discuss the gag order issue in open court. But during the jury’s lunch break, she invited the lawyers into her chambers, away from the ears of the press. When she returned, she told members of the media to shut off all electronic devices and stop live-tweeting the court’s proceedings, which she had tolerated until then but is unusual in many courts.
“You’re not to use the social media,” Naranjo told the court again, as the day’s proceedings ended.
On Thursday, Alex Jones faces cross-examination.
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.
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Our fingerprints are quickly replacing PINs and passwords as our primary means of unlocking our phones, doors and safes. They’re convenient, unique, and ultimately more secure than easily guessed or forged passwords and signatures. So it makes sense…
Fancy picking up a new DSLR? Well, not too many people are willing to take the DSLR route these days simply because there is another option that is available which is not only affordable, but it is also capable of offering a pretty reasonable level of performance — all without having to break the bank, while being light in form factor as well. This time around, the all new Nikon D7500 will make use of a powerful imaging sensor that can be found on the DX-format D500 flagship model, in addition to a slew of similar features.
The Nikon D7500 is an advanced-level DX-format DSLR which is capable of offering that provides a robust yet lightweight camera without compromising on its performance. Sporting a 20.9-megapixel image sensor, processor and wide ISO range similar to that found in the Nikon D500, this model boasts of stunning image quality, impressive speed, astounding low-light ability and 4K UHD video capture.
It does not matter whether you are going to capture the landscape at dawn, or sitting through an exciting sports event indoors with the floodlights turned on — the Nikon D7500 will be able to offer the latitude of low-light capability which helps you nail the shot consistently all the time, even under the most challenging of circumstances. Not only that, it has a native ISO range which spans from 100-51,200, alongside an expanded ISO range up to an astonishing 1.64 million equivalent.
Want to shoot athletes in action, or animals that are so fast, your regular smartphone camera fails miserably in its job? This is where the Nikon D7500 comes in handy. It has a proven 51-point AF system that covers a large portion of the frame. Boasting up to 950 shots on a single, full charge, you would not be able to go wrong if a brand new DSLR is part of your gadget wish list.
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[ Nikon D7500 delivers superior performance copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
It’s not just you, online ads are getting worse. Auto-play video has become a standard, pop-ups are back in a big way and those inline ads seem accidentally clickier all the time. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is well aware of this and it’s planning to add a built-in ad blocker to the Chrome browser. If…
When Microsoft sunsetted the popular Sunrise calendar app that it acquired, there were fears that it would do likewise when it acquired popular list app Wunderlist. Consider those fears well-founded as Microsoft releases the preview version of the generic-sounding Microsoft To-Do. It’s too early to say if To-Do will be able to match up to the standards set by Wunderlist, … Continue reading
Sure, we sort of all know some of the names of the planets in our solar system, and sure, we kind of know what many of those planets look like, right? But have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the main planets in our cosmic neighborhood as if they were always hovering in the air right above major cities?
Now that would be something. So, get ready for “Miniverse,” the most unusual road trip you’ll ever experience.
The actual distances between the planets are so vast that it’s difficult to understand the scale of our little section of the Milky Way galaxy. “Miniverse” is a new film from CuriosityStream that scales down the solar system, placing the sun and planets above the continental United States from coast to coast (as illustrated above).
Add to that a former International Space Station commander, Col. Chris Hadfield, as our guide, who literally puts the pedal to the metal as he begins a joyride across America.
“Everybody has taken car trips or road trips, and it’s a stage,” Hadfield told The Huffington Post. “When you get into a car, you communicate with the people around you in a certain way. Your conversation is fed and interrupted by the environment going by. It provides a constant external feeding source to the conversation. And a lot of really profound conversations happen in cars.”
Along the way, Hadfield picks up some interesting hitchhikers to share his adventure: Theoretical physicist and popular futurist Michio Kaku, astronomer Derrick Pitts from Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute and astronomer Laura Danly of Los Angeles’ famous Griffith Observatory.
“By putting the sun at the tip of Long Island and putting Pluto on the tip of the Santa Monica pier, and then showing the fact that, by the time you get to the Brooklyn Bridge, you’re at Mars ― the fact that you passed Mercury, then Venus and Earth on the way to Mars, and you hit Mars by the time you hit New York ― that and the whole rest of the solar system is west of there, is kind of startling and extremely memorable,” said Hadfield, who has traveled a few miles in his day.
He’s flown about 100 aircraft, including a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and a space shuttle, and he became Canada’s first man to leave a spacecraft and float in space.
In 2013, Hadfield made the first music video in space while on the International Space Station, with his captivating rendition of David Bowie’s classic “Space Oddity.”
“Most people do not have any feel at all for the solar system,” Hadfield said. “Maybe you’ve memorized something that lets you remember that it’s Mercury, then Venus, then Earth. But after watching the show, now, when someone refers to Mars or Saturn, you’ll have an internalized touchstone familiarity with where it is and why it’s different than the ones next to it, how far away it is and how it fits into context.”
Hadfield hopes “Miniverse” will bring viewers closer to the family of planets in our celestial community.
“I think the fundamental purpose of just trying to let people be familiar with the neighborhood we all live in may be the part that sticks with people the most.
“Our rate of discovery within our own solar system is accelerating, and I think we are closer to discovering life somewhere besides Earth now than we’ve ever been, and it’s all here in our own neighborhood, which is becoming more and more accessible due to technology. To remain ignorant of it is a mistake.”
“Miniverse” can be seen at CuriosityStream.
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The New England Patriots visited the White House on Wednesday to celebrate their Super Bowl win alongside President Donald Trump, an annual tradition for the winner of the NFL championship. Well, half of the Patriots did, anyway.
Thirty-four Patriots players, plus several staff members and coach Bill Belichick, attended the ceremony on the White House lawn as Trump praised what he called “the greatest Super Bowl comeback of all time.” The team’s full roster includes 68 players, which means half of the squad skipped the celebration.
Super Bowl champion players often miss the annual White House victory visit due to scheduling conflicts. But turnout for Wednesday’s event appeared to be lower than for a previous Patriots visit in 2015. To some players, absences were notably linked to politics.
The New York Times first pointed out the stark difference between photographs of the event this year, and those from 2015, the last time the Patriots won the Super Bowl. The earlier photo shows about 120 people, including players and staff, standing behind former President Barack Obama. On Wednesday, there were barely more than 50 people alongside Trump.
The Patriots strongly refuted a Times tweet showing the 2015 and 2017 photographs, saying the comparisons “lack context.” The 2015 photo included more than 40 support staff members, who were seated on the lawn this year, the team said.
”Only during the Trump presidency does the media care about this much about who doesn’t attend,” Patriots spokesman Stacey James told HuffPost.
Wednesday was the fifth time the team has gone to the White House, James said, and the number of players attending has ranged from about 27 to 50.
“Here’s what gripes me ― the scrutiny with which the visit to the White House has been handled by the press,” James said. “Never before have we had players being asked, ‘Are you going to the White House?’ … There were only a few players who came out who said they don’t support the president and weren’t going for that reason.”
Notably absent Wednesday was Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who canceled at the last minute, citing “personal family matters,” according to a statement obtained by ESPN. Brady also missed the festivities in 2015, but attended the three previous visits.
Trump didn’t mention Brady, but he did call out several players by name, including an awkward moment involving wide receiver Danny Amendola, The Boston Globe reported. Amendola was among those who missed the event.
“Where’s Danny? Where’s Danny?” Trump said. Amendola later thanked the president for the “shout out” in a since-deleted tweet, and said he was attending a funeral.
Six other Patriots had announced they wouldn’t attend the event for political reasons. The Globe reported this week that Alan Branch would skip the ceremony because of Trump’s sexist remarks, and “wouldn’t want to spend time away from my family to shake the hand of a guy I wouldn’t want to meet with or talk to.” Defensive back Devin McCourty told Time in February he would stay away, explaining the “basic reason for me is I don’t feel accepted in the White House.”
Trump has personal ties to the Patriots, as various media outlets have reported. Brady had a Make America Great Again hat in his locker for much of the 2016 season, and Trump’s campaign garnered the support of both Belichick and team owner Robert Kraft.
Kraft in February complained about media attention to players’ decisions to skip this year’s celebration, saying it was the first time people cared.
“Every time we’ve had the privilege of going to the White House, a dozen of our players don’t go,” Kraft told the “Today” show. “This is the first time it’s gotten any media attention. You know, some of the players have the privilege of going in college because they’re on national championship teams, others have family commitments. But this is America. We’re all free to do whatever’s best for us. We’re just privileged to be in a position to be going.”
Matt Ferner contributed reporting.
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Fox News’ prime-time programming opened Wednesday night without Bill O’Reilly’s name in the title graphic for the first time in more than a decade, just hours after the network announced it was severing ties with the embattled host.
Wednesday evening’s show opened with a title card that read, “The Factor,” and Fox News colleague Dana Perino began with a statement:
“Before we get to the other big stories of the day, we want to address a situation many of you may already be aware of. Bill O’Reilly, who hosted this program for 20 years, is leaving the Fox News channel. We know that you, his very loyal viewers, will have a lot feelings about this, and we will talk more about it later on in the program.”
Perino further addressed O’Reilly’s removal at the end of the hourlong show. Hours earlier, Fox News’ parent company, 21st Century Fox, said in a statement that after “a careful review” of mounting sexual harassment allegations, O’Reilly wouldn’t return.
Finally tonight, it is the end of an era at the Fox News Channel. As we mentioned earlier, Bill O’Reilly is leaving this chair and this network after more than 20 years.
Bill has been the undisputed king of cable news, and for good reason. He is an incredibly talented broadcaster who raised the bar for interviewers everywhere. He has also held his staff to exacting standards in his quest to put the best possible program on the air and they are great.
And you, his audience, responded in record numbers, making ‘The Factor’ the number one cable news show for more than 16 years. You have also been loyal and we can’t tell you how much that means to everyone on ‘The Factor.’
In a memo to the staff today, Rupert, James and Lachlan Murdoch, who run Fox News, described Bill this way: ‘By ratings standards, Bill O’Reilly is one of the most accomplished TV personalities in the history of cable news. In fact, his success by any measure is indisputable. We wish him the very best.’ I’m Dana Perino. Thanks for watching us. I’ll be here again tomorrow. Have a good night.”
By Wednesday night, O’Reilly’s likeness and name had been taken off Fox News’ website, and the website address for “The Factor” redirected to a general Fox News page.
The decision to boot O’Reilly came after a mass exodus of advertisers following a New York Times report that the network and O’Reilly himself had paid some $13 million to settle sexual harassment and behavioral complaints from women who had worked with the host.
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McDonald’s? Laundromat? Cleaning toilets? CNN?
Twitter users seem to think ousted Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has plenty of options for a new job. But most of them aren’t exactly the kind of gigs he’d want.
While plenty of people think O’Reilly might land in the White House of his friend and backer, President Donald Trump, others have less glamorous positions in mind for the fresh out-of-work “O’Reilly Factor” host.
Here’s a sampling:
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