Mediaboss Marketing

The Menlo Park Library hosts Ladera resident John Billheimer virtually in a talk about his Edgar Award-winning dive into the fascinating career of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, who spent a career battling and finessing the Motion Picture Production Code. The talk takes place on Tuesday, October 27 from 6:00 to 7:00 pm. Register online.

Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock had to deal with a wide variety of censors attuned to the slightest suggestion of sexual innuendo, undue violence, toilet humor, religious disrespect, and all forms of indecency, real or imagined.

During their review of Hitchcocks films, the censors demanded an average of 22.5 changes, ranging from the mundane to the mind-boggling, on each of his American films. Code reviewers dictated the ending of Rebecca (1940), absolved Cary Grant of guilt in Suspicion (1941), edited Cole Porters lyrics in Stage Fright (1950), decided which shades should be drawn in Rear Window (1954), and shortened the shower scene in Psycho (1960).

In Hitchcock and the Censors, the author traces the forces that led to the Production Code and describes Hitchcocks magician-like touch when negotiating with code officials and sidestepping censorship to produce a lifetime of memorable films.

John Billheimer is the author of two mystery series; one with West Virginia failure analyst Owen Allison, and the other featuring Ohio sportswriter Lloyd Keaton. He has taught courses in film noir, hard-boiled fiction on film, and the modern mystery in film and print at Stanford and Santa Clara Universities.

Read the original post:
Author John Billheimer talks about Hitchcock and the censors on October 27 - InMenlo

Overheard While Waiting to Vote in Doylestown. An older man with a Veteran's baseball cap was speaking with a younger man. They didn't seem to know each other. The young guy was asking about his military service. Vet told some stories about being in Viet Nam. Vet says something like "Trump would have been fragged in Nam". Then says the officer who planned the Bin Laden raid voted for Biden, he read it in the Wall Street Journal. Looked it up - worth sharing (from The Hill):

McRaven describes himself in the op-ed as pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, small-government, strong-defense and a national-anthem-standing conservative.

However, he wrote, I also believe that black lives matter, that the Dreamers deserve a path to citizenship, that diversity and inclusion are essential to our national success, that education is the great equalizer, that climate change is real and that the First Amendment is the cornerstone of our democracy.

We need a president who understands the importance of American leadership, at home and abroad. We need a leader of integrity whose decency and sense of respect reflects the values we expect from our president. We need a president for all Americans, not just half of America, McRaven wrote.

The retired admiral has been critical of President Trump in the past. In 2018, he wrote that Trump has "embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation."

Read the rest here:
Neighbor discussion: Why are you censoring and/or not allowing comments on the... - Patch.com

Though Mortal Kombat 11 is still going strong with the next update to Ultimate bringing with it Rain, Rambo and Mileena coming in less than a month, it's still fun to go back to its predecessor for a good time or two and maybe even some bugs.

During a recent Mortal Kombat X stream match between Smash|PNDKetchup and Smash|PNDMustard, some unexpected censorship pops up at the perfect moment in Sub-Zero's Fatality thanks to Leatherface's iconic attire.

After taking the game, Mustard has his Sub-Zero go for the ice spike stomp Fatality, but the most gruesome parts end up getting completely obscured thanks to some glitchy cloth physics.

Leatherface's apron hilariously flips upwards to cover up his entire upper body and head, so we only see some pointy pieces of ice jutting out through the piece of fabric instead of his face and chest.

The pair then dub the funny glitch a YouTube-friendly Fatality considering the video platform has long demonetized Mortal Kombat videos for their violent content and bloody finishers.

You can check out the fun MKX clip below though you can still see a loose eye ball sticking out at one point before full inadvertent censor.

Click image for full version

View post:
Leatherface's outfit comedically censors Sub-Zero's Fatality in Mortal Kombat X to make it PG-13 instead of rated R - EventHubs

This week, social media giants Twitter and Facebook proved that their monopolistic malpractice is a big problem for politics and culture in America.

When the New York Post published a story about suspicious emails that had been allegedly discovered between Hunter Biden and officials at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he was paid tens of thousands of dollars a month to serve on the board, the revelations were remarkable.

In one alleged missive from 2015, a Burisma adviser named Vadym Pozharskyi thanked the vice presidents son for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together. Its realty (sic) an honor and pleasure.

The Biden campaign has insisted that no such meeting was found to be on the official schedule, but they do not outright dispute the content of the emails or deny that an informal meeting could have occurred.

A year earlier, right after the younger Biden had been added to the companys board, Pozharskyi asked him for advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal to put a stop to an investigation into the company. Later, Vice President Biden bragged he had been able to get the prosecutor fired.

The trove of correspondence was passed on to the Post by Rudy Giuliani who has been loudly trying to draw connections of corruption between interests in Ukraine and Joe Biden via his son, Hunter.

According the the New York Post, the emails were recovered from a computer that was dropped off at a Delaware repair shop and never retrieved. It is not known who dropped the machine off.

What makes all this most newsworthy is that Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, has been denying that hed ever taken part in his sons business overseas or that he was even aware of what that business was.

These emails go directly to refuting that and suggest that Biden was used by his son for payment in exchange for influence.

Thus, the story ran and was distributed through social media until prominent, anti-Trump users demanded that it stop.

Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer with more than 900,000 followers tweeted, No one should link to or share that NY Post report. You can discuss the obvious flaws and unanswerable questions in the report without amplifying what appears to be disinformation.

Andy Stone, who works in the communications department at Facebook but has a long resume featuring jobs with various Democratic organizations was also containing the story. While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, Stone tweeted, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebooks third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

By the afternoon, Twitter started blocking sharing of the article in any form, warning users away from the link, and locking prominent accounts that shared it, including that of the New York Post itself, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the Trump campaign account @teamtrump.

In doing so, they turned a shady October surprise leak that would have been ignored by many in the mainstream into a major story that is reverberating through the country. What, many Americans wonder, do these massive tech companies want so badly to hide from them?

The selective censorship by social media monopolies threatens to divide our nation to a degree we have never seen before.

More here:
Social media censorship threatens to widen rift in U.S. - Boston Herald

We have three major breaking stories for you tonight. Many news anchors start out their shows like this every night, but the stories do not usually all qualify as major.

But last week, major does not begin to characterize the stories that broke like giant waves crashing ashore one after the other.

The confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett soaked up most of the air time for three days and were truly newsworthy, but then the New York Post broke a sensational front page news story that said emails had been found on a Hunter Biden computer hard drive that could destroy Joe Bidens candidacy.

This was like one of those monster Bonzai Pipeline waves at a surfing competition on the north shore of Oahu.

These and subsequent emails posited Hunter Biden connections with foreign parties in Ukraine, Russia, and China that resulted in enrichment of the Biden family, including the former Vice-President.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy characterized this as a message to the world that the United States of America can be bought like a sack of potatoes. In his usually colorful language, Kennedy said these accusations are as serious as four heart attacks and a stroke.

As explosive as this story was, it was met with total silence in the establishment media. Worse, links to it were blocked by Facebook and Twitter. Overnight, the venality of the Bidens was no longer the big story: censorship was.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey quickly apologized for blocking the Post story, but hes going to have to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain his companys blackout of a story damaging to Bidens campaign.

There is no acceptable explanation. The fact is that social media monopolies are in the tank for the Democrats and will justify any perverse action to help them gain power. We are accustomed to the lying, cheating, and dirty tricks that have earned politicians the lowest trustworthy rankings among all segments of our society. But censorship of a story in the press is more than that. It is a direct and corrosive attack on our democracy.

This is especially true in this case because we are in the midst of a presidential election. When Twitter censored the New York Post story, it effectively cut off a popular source of news for millions of voters on the day they went to the polls. It may or may not have an effect on the outcome of this election.

But the point is that Twitters censorship of a story as serious as four heart attacks and a stroke was perniciously partisan and should be condemned by everyone, even any of the yet silent media.

The New York Post is a conservative newspaper. Within recognized legal limits, it is entitled to the fundamental right of press freedom spelled out so clearly in the First Amendment to the Constitution, just as its rivals at the liberal New York Times and Washington Post are entitled to it. Twitter violated that right.

Our Founding Fathers recognized that the exchange of ideas, even contrarious ones, is essential in a free society, and that the freedom to express these ideas in the press must be protected.

They would be appalled, and saddened, at the sight of social media giants willingness to crack a fundamental pillar of our democracy to achieve their partisan goals.

Claude Milot of Hertford worked in the publishing business for 33 years.

Excerpt from:
Milot's Musings: Censor This | | dailyadvance.com - The Daily Advance