"Sephora is a smoke monster, a rainbow, a Mobius strip of promises. There's no getting a grip on it. There is no end."

"There's only more. You can chase the dragon of self-improvement slash self-enhancement slash self-acceptance until the day you die; there's always a new fragrance, a new lip color, a new miracle cream right around the corner...."

You go in for a lip balm and come out with body polish, dry shampoo, BB cream, and Kat Von D's "Sinner" smoky eyes palette. (The are over 100,000 videos titled "Sephora Haul" on YouTube to watch should you have any doubts.) Oodles on display, a myriad of options, infinite possibilities. When you think you've finally found the solution, the crutch, the key, either you run out and need more; they stop making it and it vanishes like so much sparkly Guerlain Terra Cotta dust; or you find that what once satisfied you no longer does the trick.

100,000 videos. I tried watching one and got a couple minutes in... about 20% through. It really is a form of madness. You need to be careful going in. It's quite bizarre. You've got to admire the design of the place. A shop is a psychological manipulation and it's impressive when it's done well, but — as I said — you need to be careful.

"It's questionable for a candidate appear on a book cover with a scantily clad woman or to crudely dismiss Jewish people in an online video..."

"... even if it's done as satire. Nor is it ideal for someone seeking statewide office to make a rude gesture to a state senator during committee testimony."

And the statewide office is...

... Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice.

Galeazzo Frudua replicates the sound of the Beatles' singing with remarkable accuracy...

... except for that bit of Italian accent, which proves it really is him singing all the parts. And he explains what he's doing in that charming accent in a series of YouTube videos. Here he is with "Nowhere Man":



Frudua doesn't talk about the personalities of The Beatles, but his demonstration made me think about the way John was singing his song, and George (with the lower voice) harmonized by going more toward monotony, while Paul (with the higher voice) got fancier and more dramatic, making the backup into the show-off spot. George, you might say, was modest and self-effacing, while Paul was competitive, to the point where he almost seems to be daring John to slug him for taking over his song. And yet the sound is of 3 men blended perfectly.

It's fascinating to me that Frudua is so finely tuned to the details of sound, yet retains his accent. Maybe he's choosing that. If so, it's a nice touch.

A "concerned sister" gets press petitioning Hasbro to put boys in commercials for Easy-Bake ovens.

"The toy has long been marketed to girls and made in gender specific colors like pink and purple. The calls for Easy-Bake to take on a more gender-neutral stance has been made numerous times in the past."

Funny that it's still okay to call some colors "gender specific." But progress comes incrementally. The day will come when we get our viral video pleading for the end of stereotyping pink and purple as girl colors.

Meanwhile, in Sweden:

Sweden's top advertising watchdog—known as Reklamombudsmannen, or RO—has taken [Toys "R" Us] to task in recent years for catalogs and ads that showcase girls playing with dolls, scrapbooks, and kitchen and beauty toys and boys with guns, cars, trains and tech gadgets....

The Swedish government has been on the front line of efforts to engineer equality between men and women....

"I think it's amazing that they've actually listened to the consumers," [said a female shopper]. "I didn't used to shop here as much before they changed, because I didn't like the way they separated between girls and boys, pink and blue."

Here's what you get with government pressure (and maybe with You-Tube and Change.org):



Somehow, I don't see that photo bringing in any boys that wouldn't have felt drawn to the activity anyway, but perhaps it's intended to make parents feel and act better when their son tells them that's what he wants.

As for the 13-year-old girl's video:



Was that little boy scripted? Leave him alone, and don't put him on YouTube. It seems to me he's already saying he likes to cook and wants a toy oven and the lack of boys in the ads wasn't perceived as a problem. Hold off on the indoctrination and let him discover his own happiness.

"Via a psychedelic music aficionado acquaintance - Is this something you've heard of?"

A reader [ADDED: Hazy Dave] sends me this link and says:

As an old Audible Althouse listener, I can understand the appeal of having a friendly well-modulated voice in your ears (though I usually can't get through entire an podcast and I'm too impatient to listen to books, even while driving). But I guess I listen to music for the occasional goose-bumps or “bubbles in your head” experience. Listening to a young blonde whisper in your ear seems like cheating, if not outright pr0n... I may need to try this out with earbuds later, just to see if I get weirded out, or if it just seems funny, or what. "Unsettling" seems like a reasonable starting point, even (very quietly) through tinny office computer speakers.

Wow! I watched some of those ASMR videos, then went back to some Audible Althouse  — my 2005-2006 podcast project— they're all here [ADDED: or maybe not.] It really does seem like that ASMR stuff. Truly strange from that perspective!

This reminds me a bit of Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North" and my own practice of falling asleep and sleeping playing an audiobook, a book read by a man with a gentle voice (almost always Bill Bryson, David Rakoff, or David Foster Wallace).

At the first link:

If... you’re one of the people the video was made for—one of those people who experience Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—you’ll probably find all six minutes incredibly satisfying, the video equivalent of a really nice, mellow kind of drug that leaves no aftertaste....

ASMR is a tricky feeling to describe, and I can only talk about it secondhand. From what I understand from conversations with ASMRers, it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine....

"We are just awakening to the need for some scrutiny or oversight or public attention to the decisions of the most powerful private speech controllers..."

... lawprof Tim Wu told the NYT, which has an article that seems to be searching for a way to legitimate making private companies like Google suppress free speech.

Mr. Wu offered some unsolicited advice: Why not set up an oversight board of regional experts or serious YouTube users from around the world to make the especially tough decisions?

Oh, yeah, an oversight board of regional experts.... Isn't that what you want? Panels of regional experts bearing down on the free speech we have through private internet services like YouTube?

ADDED: Here's that conversation I had with Bob Wright last year about the applicability of free speech values to the work of private corporations.

"Google will leave a controversial video clip about the Islamic prophet Muhammad on YouTube..."

"... despite a White House request that the company review it under its own policies, the company said Friday."

“We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement. “This can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere. This video — which is widely available on the Web — is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube.”

Thanks to Google, a corporation, with stronger free-speech values than the United States government is willing to support.

"Turmoil in the Arab world linked to an American-made video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad spread on Thursday to Yemen..."

"... where hundreds of protesters attacked the American Embassy, two days after assailants killed the American ambassador in Libya and crowds tried to overrun the embassy compound in Cairo."

Writes the NYT, where I struggle to figure out how they know the precise motivation of a mob. Who is conveying this information to the NYT? And even if we do know that it is that video that's firing up the mob, I'd like to know the source of the mob-members' knowledge of the video? Surely, they are not individually clicking on YouTube and watching it and deciding on their own how outraged to be. There must be intermediaries inciting the mob, saying things about the video to stir people up and set them off. Who are they? What are they saying?


There's this, down at the end of the article:

Little is known about the origin of the video that provoked the protests, which is called “Innocence of Muslims.” It was made in obscurity somewhere in Southern California and promoted by a network of right-wing Christians with a history of animosity directed toward Muslims. When a 14-minute trailer of it was posted on YouTube in June, it was barely noticed.

But when the amateurish video was translated into Arabic and reposted twice on YouTube in the days before Sept. 11, and promoted by leaders of the Coptic diaspora in the United States, it drew nearly one million views and set off bloody demonstrations.

Where's the proof of causation in that last sentence? Is it just the timing? This happened and then that happened. Correlation/causation. Were the demonstrators people with internet connections, or were the one million views from the Coptics? Who is promoting this theory of causation and why should we trust them? The video was translated.... Save us from the passive voice, New York Times. I remember when journalists asked a set of question the first of which was who?

Meanwhile, we know what our leaders are saying about and to this mob (though I don't see how these statements reach the mob, so maybe they aren't to the mob at all):

“This video is disgusting and reprehensible,” Mrs. Clinton said in remarks at the State Department, broadcast live on CNN. She also said “The U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with this video.”

Do these mob-members — on the off chance that they're listening — understand that assertion? If they don't care about freedom of speech and want government suppression of blasphemy, then it is the government's responsibility. If there's a spree of robberies in my city, I'm going to get mad at the government, even though the robbers aren't government agents.

Protesters tore down and burned an American flag, replacing it with their own banner proclaiming the Islamic faith, witnesses said.

They want a different system of government, which would prohibit the video Mrs. Clinton denounces as disgusting and reprehensible. And we here in America are having a debate about what our political values are. It is not to censor videos. I trust that's not in question. But there is a question about whether our governmental officials should denounce privately made and distributed movies in an effort to calm down people who hate our political values.

President George Bush said it well: They hate our freedom. Here's his speech from September 20, 2001:

Americans are asking "Why do they hate us?''

They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way.

We're not deceived by their pretenses to piety.

We have seen their kind before. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.

11 years later, we are having a debate here in America. We've cast George Bush out into the shadows. We elected a President 4 years ago who made many of us believe he could make them not hate us. We're having a new election now, and we have to talk.

If Obama talked like this in 2008...

... how can it be awesomely awful for candidate Romney to articulate his criticism of the present administration?

Video via Ed Morrissey ("I think that policy in Iraq and Afghanistan were perfectly acceptable topics for political debate at that time"), via Instapundit (FLASHBACK: Major-Party Nominee Uses War Deaths To Score Political Points. Yeah, but he was a Democrat, and black, and hence above media criticism.").

Can we get some consistency from the big-media pundits? Shouldn't the NYT, for example, have noticed by now that new media is dogging them, and we have YouTube? I mean, they've got to feel how it's screwed up the economics of newspapers. But to ignore the way they undermine their credibility — don't they see how damaging it is to the political power they clearly want? That is, if they want that power, they need to make sure it is not clear.

The more MSM lets their lust show, the less likely we highly selective swing voters will spend any time with you. You have to insinuate yourself into our minds, and you've triggered our resistance. We're turned off. Yes, the base loves what you're saying, but they didn't need to be seduced.

"The US ambassador to Libya is among four Americans killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi..."

"... President Barack Obama has confirmed."

"Chris was a courageous and exemplary representative of the United States. Throughout the Libyan revolution, he selflessly served our country and the Libyan people at our mission in Benghazi..."

Said Obama, calling the attack "outrageous attack" on the facility in Benghazi. "Chris" is J. Christopher Stevens.

The film that sparked the demonstration is said to have been produced by a 52-year-old US citizen from California named Sam Bacile, and promoted by an expatriate Egyptian Copt...

This is a "low-budget movie" that can be seen on YouTube. 

"What a perfect opportunity to inflict this on Althouse readers!"

Said Palladian...

You could have been a YouTube star.

I see this 3-year-old girl is an international celebrity for climbing up the inside of a door frame... just like my son Chris used to do:

Governor Christie presents you with these, the 1-liners he wants you to remember him by.

This is from the governor's own YouTube page.

What do you think?
	The man is crude and thinks he's cute. Ugh.
	He's sharp and funny, but a bit too pleased about it.
	Brilliant, hilarious, and it's cool to present it clipped together like this.
pollcode.com free polls

"The two versions of ['What What (In The Butt)'] are very similar.... However the South Park version stars Butters..."

"... a naïve nine-year old, in a variety of costumes drawing attention to his innocence: at various points he is dressed as a teddy bear, an astronaut and a daisy."

An excellent discussion of the elements of "fair use" in copyright, from the 7th Circuit, in a case called Brownmark Films v. Comedy Partners (PDF). Via Above The Law.

You can watch the original "paean to anal sex" — "featuring an adult male singing and dancing in tight pants" — here. And the South Park parody — using "a large portion of the original version, using the same angles, framing, dance moves and visual elements" — is here. From the opinion:

The Copyright Act of 1976 sets forth four, non-exclusive factors that a court must consider in determining whether a particular use of a copyrighted work is a fair use: “(1) the purpose and character of the use . . . ; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” 17 U.S.C. § 107 (2006). We consider each factor in turn, ultimately agreeing with the district court’s analysis and findings.

Central to determining the purpose and character of a work is whether the new work merely supersedes the original work, or instead adds something new with a further purpose or of a different character....

Regarding the third factor, SPDS’s use of the original WWITB was not insubstantial. Certainly, SPDS used the “heart” of the work; the work’s overall design and distinctive visual elements.... Parody therefore “presents a difficult case.” Id. Indeed, it may even seem as an anomaly under fair use that parody, a favored use, must use a substantial amount of qualitative and quantitative elements to create the intended allusion; there are few alternatives. But when parody achieves its intended aim, the amount taken becomes reasonable when the parody does not serve as a market substitute for the work....

It follows from the third factor that SPDS’s parody cannot have an actionable effect on the potential market for or value of the original WWITB video under the fourth factor. As the South Park episode aptly points out, there is no “Internet money” for the video itself on YouTube, only advertising dollars that correlate with the number of views the video has had. It seems to this court that SPDS’s likely effect, ironically, would only increase ad revenue. Any effect on the derivative market for criticism is not protectable. Id. at 592. And the plaintiff has failed to give the district court or this court any concrete suggestion about potential evidence indicating that the South Park parody has cut into any real market (with real, non-Internet dollars) for derivative uses of the original WWITB video.

I'm not a copyright expert, but I think that's well analyzed. It's good to see parody getting room to breathe, and I think the original artist is better off after having this boost from South Park. His litigiousness makes him less likeable. I can see why he wants his cash, but I don't like copyright litigation as the way to monetize your YouTube videos.

The case also has some great material for civil procedure fans. The court says South Park should have "captioned" its motion as a motion for summary judgment rather than a motion to dismiss. The court notes the arguments about the fact that Butters is naïve and the lack of evidence on that score. The court says the Butters' naïveté isn't crucial to its analysis, but it nevertheless crafts a footnote pointing us to other South Park episodes establishing the naïveté of Butters:

See, e.g., Butters’ Very Own Episode (Comedy Central television broadcast Dec. 12, 2001) (perceiving sex as wrestling), see also Cartman Sucks (Comedy Central television broadcast Mar. 14, 2007); Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset (Comedy Central television broadcast Dec. 1, 2004). Indeed, in one of these episodes, Butters is dressed in the same teddy bear costume he wears in the WWITB video. Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset (Comedy Central television broadcast Dec. 1, 2004).

"In A World Where..."

"... One Teen's Voice Is An Internet Hit."

What vegans say.

My favorite out of a whole lot of videos I watched after getting sucked into the YouTube genre "Shit [blanks] Say."

Too much -pie: 3 Occupies in 6 days.

Occupy Lincoln, Occupy Denver, and Occupy Austin... experienced in less than a week.

The last couple seconds — which are not part of the protest — show something Meade and I call "an army of Jeremys."

The FedEx publicity nightmare YouTube video that has over 6 million views...

... in less than 5 days:

Taking the "you"...

... out of YouTube.

Women's racist rant on a London train goes viral... and now she's been arrested.

Here's the report of her arrest. Here's the clip, posted 2 days ago, with almost 7,000 comments.

Here's the Metafilter discussion, where one commenter says "I'm ambivalent about this in that there is a part of me that doesn't want to feel any sympathy for her at all... [b]ut there's a tinge of pitchforkery (jumped on by the usually deeply racist media) that gives me huge pause for thought" and links to this aggregration of Tweets:

[O]n Twitter, the righteous have massed. The Twitter Hunters are in favour of shooting the mother and leaving her child possibly orphaned. Some order a hit. Others want her to be sent to Africa where intolerant blacks will judge her. Others want “the slag” raped. Intolerance will not be tolerated.