Despite wanting to resurrect their family's public image, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar turned down a post-scandal interview with People magazine because they could not get a guarantee that questions about son Josh would be off-limits, reports the New York Daily News.
People magazine -- which has always had a loving relationship with the stars of 19 Kids and Counting -- approached the Duggars for a cover story interview prior to revelations last week that son Josh admitted to having adulterous affairs after signing up on the Ashley Madison website site.
While the Duggars were initially receptive to an interview with People, negotiations bogged down when it came to talking about Josh.
“They did not want to discuss the scandal, only the future of the family. They wanted to avoid it altogether, which is completely ridiculous,” explained a source at People. “How can they do a cover story and not address the issue at hand?”
“People tried to negotiate and eventually played hardball, saying we’re doing the cover with or without you,” the source said.
People had already gone to press with an article entitled: "In Their Own Words: The Duggars Share Thoughts on Their Uncompromising Religious Lifestyle," before the Ashley Madison adultery scandal broke which worked out well for the gossip magazine even without the interview.
“That may actually work in People’s favor, because if you see that on a newsstand you’ll assume it’s inside the magazine,” claimed the person inside People.
Notable in the People article was the absence of Josh Duggar and his wife and children in the accompanying photo.
One New Jersey woman is calling upon fellow Garden State native Jon Stewart to step in and moderate the 2016 presidential debate because she feels he's "been a great voice for so many people" and could steer the conversation in a more meaningful direction. As of Friday morning, nearly 140,000 people agree with her. Mariel Waters,…
Graffiti artist Banksy announced the opening of a dystopian theme park in a British seaside town on Thursday, featuring boats filled with migrants and an anarchist training camp.
The "Dismaland" theme park is located in a derelict outdoor swimming pool centre in Weston-super-Mare, a coastal town near Bristol in the west of England.
Visitors will be greeted by a burned-out version of the famous Disneyland castle, and a dead Cinderella hanging out of her crashed pumpkin carriage surrounded by paparazzi.
It features a riot van built to patrol the streets of Northern Ireland, altered to boast a brightly-coloured slide alongside its water cannon.
In one fairground game, visitors can steer miniature boats full of asylum seekers around a pond.
"I guess you'd say it's a theme park whose big theme is theme parks should have bigger themes," Banksy said in a statement, describing the show as "a festival of art, amusements and entry-level anarchism".
Spray paint, marker pens, knives and "legal representatives of the Walt Disney Corporation" are banned from the site.
The park also features works from artists from Israel, Palestine and Syria hand-picked by the elusive Banksy, who keeps his face and identity a secret and made his name with subversive graffiti, including some left in the ruins of homes in Gaza earlier this year.
Fellow artists in the exhibition include Britain's Damien Hirst; Jenny Holzer, the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale; and pensioner Ed Hall, who has made trade union banners in his shed for four decades.
The local town council is hopeful that the theme park will draw visitors back to Weston-super-Mare, which like many British seaside resort towns has suffered with the growing popularity of overseas travel.
"It's a fantastic show," said North Somerset Council leader Nigel Ashton. "It's very, very thought provoking. Some of the messages are hard to accept but true nevertheless.
"We're extremely lucky that it's come here," he added. "We hope that people will visit the show and then come to see the town."
The development of the show was kept a strict secret before its official announcement, with local people told a cover story that the abandoned swimming area was being used in a film.
The exhibition opens this Saturday until Sept. 27, and will feature performances from musicians including Russian feminist punk rockers Pussy Riot and England's Massive Attack.
On Thursday afternoon, erstwhile reality TV star and former antigay shill Josh Duggar posted another agonized confession to the family's Facebook page, this time for having an account with the hookup site for married people looking to cheat, Ashley Madison.
In the post, Duggar confessed to having an "addiction" to pornography and to having cheated on his wife, Anna, the mother of his three children.
Users of the social medium Twitter quickly pounced on the confession, which came only 90 days after his last statement begging for fans' forgiveness. Previously he confessed to molesting his sisters and another girl when he was a teen.
Organizers of the Burning Man festival confirmed that the Nevada-based event has some uninvited guests this year -- a massive mosquito infestation, Business Insider reported.
"What's going on? We don't know. We don't know how the little critters survive in the heat and the sun," John Curley wrote in the festival blog. "All we know is that if you pick up some wood, you're likely to uncover hundreds or thousands of the things. They've blown up inches deep against the sides of the Commissary tent. They've covered the carpets at the Depot. They're all over the Man Base. So it's not a localized occurrence, it's everywhere."
Though the event does not start until Aug. 30, photos showing the extent of the infestation have already been posted online, as seen below:
According to Curley, festival officials believe the bugs were either hatched early after a rash of rain in the area during the spring and summer, or brought in when they "hitchhiked on a load of wood."
"We've been blessed by fair skies so far during the build," he wrote. "For the first time in the past several years, there's been no rain or lightning or hail or high winds to bring things to a crawl. But maybe we are making our way around the various plagues, and this year it’s time for pestilence."
KNTV-TV identified the bugs as mosquitos, adding that organizers are determining whether they pose a health threat to festival goers
As the event grapples with the plague, music site Less Than 3 reported that, according to CEO Marian Goodell, she is looking "longingly" toward perhaps moving the event to Utah, citing a 9 percent entertainment tax levied against Burning Man under Nevada law.
"We still believe that we don't fit under a form of entertainment," she said during a recent podcast interview. "Frankly, we're not a Las Vegas show. We're not a car race or a concert in a stadium."
Goodell argued that the event is not a festival, saying that for many people, that label "now means stages and food vendors and having your comforts more taken care of. We're definitely not interested in providing a typical festival atmosphere."
She also criticized the event being limited to 68,000 participants, as ordered by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
"That's not something we're doing willingly," she said.
Former reality show star and anti-LGBT activist Josh Duggar had two paid accounts on the infidelity-based match-making website Ashley Madison, Gawker reported on Wednesday.
Data posted after the website was hacked shows accounts listed under the name "Joshua J. Duggar," with one listing an address matching the home that was featured on the Learning Channel program 19 Kids and Counting. Another address, which was opened in July 2014, was listed under an address in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
The second account contains an extra $250 payment for the site's "affair guarantee." Collectively, the accounts attributed to Duggar were active from February 2013 to this past May, when Duggar he resigned his position as a lobbyist for the Family Research Council after he confirmed that he molested two of his sisters when he was a teenager.
Just hours after Rosie O'Donnell announced her daughter was missing, the teen has been found safe in New Jersey. Police located Chelsea O'Donnell, 17, today in Barnegat Township, not long after O'Donnell tweeted about her daughter's disappearance, the Los Angeles Times reports. That's about a 95-mile trip from her home in Nyack, N.Y., where she was…
Former Subway sandwich chain spokesperson Jared Fogle will plead guilty to charges of possessing child pornography, WXIN-TV reported.
The company dropped Fogle after federal and state officials raided his home in Indiana, ending his 15-year association with the restaurant chain.
Officials from the US Attorneys office will reportedly hold a press conference on Wednesday announcing the charges against Fogle, and his agreement with prosecutors.
TLC said that Breaking the Silence is an attempt by the network to shed light on the issue of child sex abuse and that it will feature appearances by members of the Duggar clan. The special is set to run commercial-free.
"Over these past weeks, TLC has consulted regularly with leading victims' rights and advocacy organizations in the U.S., including RAINN and Darkness to Light, to discuss how to use this moment to address the issue and make a positive impact," said a statement from the network. "Unfortunately, child sexual abuse is not an isolated issue; it affects many children and families around the world. To that end, we are partnering with both organizations on a multi-platform campaign to raise awareness and educate parents and families about the issue. In the first phase of this initiative, TLC will work closely with both groups and with the Duggar family on a one-hour documentary that will include Jill and Jessa and other survivors and families that have been affected by abuse."
TLC canceled 19 Kids and Counting in spite of its high ratings after it came to light that the Duggars' eldest son Josh had molested his sisters and another girl as a teen. The family turned to family friend Joseph Hutchens of the Arkansas State Patrol, who never brought Josh up on formal charges. That officer was later arrested himself for possession of child pornography.
Josh was briefly handed over to the care of pastor Bill Gothard, who let Josh work construction on his new ministry as a form of Christian counseling. By Gothard's reckoning, the "godly" work put the eldest Duggar son back on the right path and "gave him a whole new respect for the young ladies."
This mishandling of the abuse and the family's attempts to hide it from the public were more than TLC was willing to countenance and the network wisely canceled the show.
A source close to the Duggars told Star magazine that Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are desperate to keep some form of reality TV revenue coming in to support their outsized brood.
“The family can’t afford to not have the show -- it is their main source of income, and with a family of that size, without it they’re in enormous trouble,” said the family friend. “They know they have to at least pretend to be sorry about what happened, and now they want a spin-off where Jim Bob and Michelle would give advice to abuse victims—even though they’re in denial about their culpability in Josh’s crimes.”
Earlier this summer, the couple did a disastrous interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly, which was widely panned by viewers, who felt that the family were still enabling their sexual predator son.
“After the Megyn Kelly interview, when they basically made excuses for Josh, they’re done,” said Star's source. “It was a disastrous move that ruined their brand. It would take a miracle to get them back on TV.”
Breaking the Silence will air at 10 p.m. on Aug. 30 on TLC.
Watch the Megyn Kelly interview, broadcast June 03, 2015, below:
[Ed. note: An earlier draft inadvertently omitted the Duggar family's dealings with disgraced Arkansas State Trooper Joseph Hutchens]
Jon Stewart has found a new post-Comedy Central job -- at least for one night.
According to Uproxx, Stewart will appear as the host for World Wrestling Entertainment's (WWE) "SummerSlam" event on Sunday.
Stewart let his pro-wrestling fandom slip at times during his tenure on the Daily Show, as he would sometime mix in references to WWE storylines as an aside from his usual commentary. He finally this past March, though, as part of an on-screen rivalry with the promotion's current heavyweight champion, the villainous Seth Rollins.
"It was not my intention to kick him," Stewart said after booting Rollins in the groin. "That was as high as my leg would go."
Rollins later appeared on the show and presented the host with an "honorary" WWE title belt, as part of the extended sendoff for Stewart's tenure leading the Daily Show.
The event will be held at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, starting at 7 p.m. EST.
Watch footage from one of Stewart's meetings with Rollins, as posted online, below.
Tracy Morgan has vowed to return to comedy, a year after he was badly injured in a car accident that claimed the life of a longtime friend.
On 7 June 2014, the limousine van in which Morgan was traveling collided with a Walmart truck on the New Jersey Turnpike. The star of 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live suffered a serious brain injury, a broken leg and broken ribs. The 62-year-old comedian James McNair, who went by the name Jimmy Mack, was killed.
On Monday, in his first interview since the accident, Morgan sat down with the host of NBC’s Today Show, Matt Lauer , to discuss the crash, his recovery and the victims’ confidential settlement with the retail giant.
“I love comedy and I can’t wait to get back to her but right now my goal is just to heal and get better because I’m not 100% yet,” said Morgan, holding a cane. “I’m not, and when I’m there you’ll know it. I’ll get back to making you laugh. I promise you.”
Morgan said harder than the recovery was waking up from a coma to learn that his longtime friend had died.
“Bones heal, but the loss of my friend will never heal,” Morgan told Lauer, as he fought back tears. “But I’m happy that Walmart stepped up to the plate in a tremendous way.”
Last week, Walmart settled for an undisclosed sum a lawsuit brought by Morgan and two others who were seriously injured in the accident.
Morgan’s attorney, Benedict P Morelli, told Lauer on Monday that Walmart took “full responsibility” for the accident. Walmart had already settled a wrongful death claim with McNair’s children.
The driver of the truck, Kevin Roper, had been on the job for more than 13 hours at the time of the crash, according to a report by federal transportation safety investigators. Federal rules permit truck drivers to work up to 14 hours a day, with a maximum of 11 hours behind the wheel.
Morelli said he and Morgan would meet personally with Walmart chief executive Douglas McMillon this week.
McMillon “wants to say sorry to Tracy directly and, I think, apologize and see that he’s OK,” Morelli said. “I though that was a huge gesture.”
Later on Monday, Morgan used Twitter to send a message to his fans. “It’s been a year,” he said. “Just wanted to say thank you for all of your love and support. Will see you soon.”
Farting is a universal human experience, as routine as eating, breathing and sleeping. And it seems to be a cross-cultural and trans-historical fact that passing gas, at least in most social contexts, is rude and offensive.
There’s also the fundamental truth pertaining to the topic: farts are funny. But why is this the case? They’re often a source of discomfort and embarrassment, so why do they double as an inspiration for humor, even literary beauty?
Literary giants let it rip
Every culture in recorded history has had its preferred forms of humor relating to bodily functions, but none have been more reliable in stirring a reaction than fart jokes. In fact, according to British academic and poet Paul MacDonald, the oldest joke in recorded history – which dates back to the Sumerians in 1900 BC – was a fart joke: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
Fart jokes have also found their way into some of the classics of Western literature. One of the most well-known appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In the Miller’s Tale, Nicholas and Absalom are vying for the same girl, and Nicholas decides to humiliate his rival. So he waits at the window for Absalom to beckon the girl. And just when he does, Nicholas’ rear protrudes to “let fly a fart with a noise as great as a clap of thunder, so that Absalom was almost overcome by the force of it.”
Even the great Bard of Avon himself, William Shakespeare, resorted to a flatulence pun in his play The Comedy of Errors, where Dromio of Ephesus declares, “A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind; Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.”
Less surprisingly, the irreverent Mark Twain’s spoof entitled 1601 features the flatus. In this imagined conversation between Queen Elizabeth’s court and a few renowned writers, someone among the company passes gas: “In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore.”
The queen inquires as to the source, and one Lady Alice declares her innocence: “Nay, ‘tis not I yt have broughte forth this rich o'ermastering fog, this fragrant gloom, so pray you seeke ye further.”
Meanwhile, Jonathan Swift, the author of the classic Gulliver’s Travels, devoted an entire book to the subject with The Benefit of Farting Explained. (Swift published it under the pseudonym “Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast in the University of Crackow.”) The title page asserts that the essay was “translated into English at the Request and for the Use of the Lady Damp-Fart, of Her-fart-shire” by “Obadiah Fizzle, Groom of the Stool to the Princess of Arse-Mini in Sardinia.” And an opening poetic ode refers to the flatus as “Cure of cholick, cure of gripes, tuneful drone of lower pipes.”
Swift then goes on to subject the fart to a detailed analysis – carefully describing its legal, social and scientific dimensions – before concluding that there are multiple species of fart, including “the sonorous and full-toned or rousing fart,” “the double fart,” “the soft fizzing fart,” “the wet fart” and “the sullen wind-bound fart.”
The philosophy of fart jokes
Clearly, as these examples show, flatulence humor is timeless. But why are farts universally funny?
The superiority theory says that we laugh when we feel “sudden glory,” as Thomas Hobbes put it – a sudden sense of superiority over a person, especially someone to whom we ordinarily feel inferior. Cases of slapstick humor, such as the pie-in-the-face or someone slipping on a banana peel, fall into this category.
Kant and Schopenhauer argued on behalf of the incongruity theory, which says we laugh at the juxtaposition of things that don’t ordinarily go together, such as a talking dog or a bearded woman.
And relief theorists like Spencer and Freud maintain that laughter is how we relieve nervous tension regarding subjects or situations that are socially taboo or inappropriate. This explains the popular appeal of jokes based on sex, ethnicity and religion.
But must we regard these theories as mutually exclusive? I suspect they are compatible explanations for different contexts of humor.
Philosopher John Morreall defends a theory that invites such a view. Morreall proposes that the common core to anything that prompts laughter is a “pleasant psychological shift.” If we apply this theory to flatulence, it becomes clear why farts are universally funny. It’s because they are capable of producing this effect in all of the ways identified by the three theories of humor.
And events that satisfy the criteria for all three forms of humor tend to be especially funny. For example, a few years ago, a YouTube post was made of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly passing gas repeatedly on a live broadcast (to date, this clip has nearly 12 million views).
A moment of release for Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.
Whether or not this actually happened, Kelly’s gaseous outburst certainly prompts a sudden sense of superiority in viewers, and it’s obviously incongruous with the formal context of a news broadcast. Moreover, the laughter this elicits (as it did even on the set of the broadcast) helps to relieve the nervous tension created by this social taboo.
But even where farts only satisfy one of the criteria for producing the “pleasant psychological shift” they are still humorous. And in most social contexts, they do at least this much. So farts are consistently funny.
This account of the universality of flatulence humor is, of course, a matter of debate. But one thing is beyond dispute: farts are funny. They always have been. And, it appears, they always will be.
Lisa Kennedy Montgomery: It’s actually very brilliant marketing on the part of Coca Cola, because they realize that if someone hears that there’s a scientific study behind a reported fact, then they take that, they internalize it and take it to be true … So, what Coca Cola has decided to do is use that “science” in their favor. And if only they could find a few scientists willing to report that it’s not the calories but the lack of exercise that’s making people obese, then they can use this as a sort of an underground marketing strategy.
Shepard Smith: Well this reminds me of two things. The article in the New York Times this weekend pointed out, it reminds you of exactly what the tobacco industry did back in the day, and more recently it also reminds you of what the climate deniers, the climate change deniers are doing as well.
The interview began not with a discussion of science, but rather with criticism of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan . Both host Stuart Varney and Roy Spencer claimed that the plan would increase energy bills for America’s poor. The Obama administration claims the opposite – that the plan will save the average American family nearly $85 on their annual energy bill in 2030. Although electricity prices are expected to rise, utility bills are projected to fall due to improvements in energy efficiency spurred by the rule, and hence reduced electricity consumption.
Spencer also claimed that wind and solar energy are “much more expensive than fossil fuels,” which is simply false . In any case, if conservatives are really concerned about the possibility of rising energy bills for low-income families, they can replace these regulations with a revenue-neutral carbon fee whose rebates would offset any increase in electricity costs.
Unfortunately the interview didn’t include any such constructive policy debate. Instead it shifted to science denial, with Spencer repeating the false claim of no global warming over the past 18 years. In reality, during that time the oceans , surface , and even the lower atmosphere have continued to warm. Unexpectedly, host Stuart Varney pushed back against this global warming denial, pointing out that 14 of the last 15 years have been the hottest on record , and Spencer was forced to admit that the planet has continued to warm.
Consistent with his status as one of the fewer than 3% of climate contrarian researchers, Spencer also contested the human contribution to global warming in the interview, using the same strategies discussed on Shepard Smith’s show. Spencer claimed,
We have published evidence and there’s getting to be more and more papers published in the scientific literature pointing out that about half of the warming we’ve seen since the 1950s has been natural rather than man-made. It’s because of more frequent El Niño activity.
In reality, very few scientific papers have blamed global warming on El Niño. Spencer is one of the few to make this argument, specifically arguing that changes in El Niño have changed cloud cover on Earth, which in turn impacts global temperatures. However, his analysis has been shown to be flawed in subsequent research by prominent climate scientists like Kevin Trenberth and Andrew Dessler . Scientist Barry Bickmore described Spencer’s study as a “curve-fitting paper,” using an approach also described by climate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert as “ How to cook a graph in three easy lessons .”
The big problem with Spencer’s argument is that there have been a roughly equal number of El Niño and La Niña events since 1950 , so the temporary surface temperature cooling effects of the latter have cancelled out the temporary surface warming effects of the former during that time. These short-term cycles can’t explain the rapid global warming we’ve observed over the past 65 years.
However, as noted on Shepard Smith’s show, it’s smart marketing to focus on the outlier studies that argue the contrarian position, because “if someone hears that there’s a scientific study behind a reported fact, then they take that, they internalize it and take it to be true.” That’s exactly how Fox News markets global warming denial on most of its programs.
