LOVE ANGELES

Haiti Telethon: What You Didn't See on TV

Source: People - Hollywood came together to support Haiti on Friday night – and reunited a few famous exes in the process.

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who split five years ago, were both on the same soundstage at L.A.'s CBS Studios where he presented and she manned the phones at the Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief, but they did not cross paths, according to a source.

Justin Timberlake, who sang a soulful rendition of "Hallelujah" with Tennman artist Matt Morris, bumped into his ex, Cameron Diaz, off camera. "They ran into each other after he performed and she was in the phone bank and then they talked," the source says.

"The celebrities were so low-key. Everyone drove themselves, there were no handlers, no entourages," adds the source. "Everyone was in a good mood. Most people showed up early and many celebrities, including Chevy Chase, Olivia Wilde and David Archuleta, stayed after the telethon was over so they could keep answering phone calls.

The A-list event was co-hosted by George Clooney and Wyclef Jean and presented by MTV Networks and broadcast on nearly a dozen channels.

Making Connections

"Celebs were catching up with each other and sitting down with staff and just chatting, talking about how sad the situation in Haiti was and how happy they were to help. The success of the night put a lot of people in a euphoric mood and a lot of people made plans to get together later," the source adds.

Before the show started, early arrivals Reese Witherspoon and Julia Roberts were deep in conversation when Drew Barrymore came over to join them before all three women took their seats at the phone bank.

Penelope Cruz approached organizer Clooney, who a source says was "very hands-on" during the telecast, and told him, "You're a genius," after he brought so many people together for the event, which raised money by encouraging viewers to call 1-877-99-Haiti to pledge money for the cause.

Backstage: Newlywed Kevin Jonas ran into Zac Efron's girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens and expressed his hope that "the four of us" would hang out soon.

In the greenroom, Chris Rock noshed on a cupcake from Crumbs bakery while talking to Ben Stiller. Morgan Freeman and Halle Berry chatted about her daughter Nahla. And Leonardo DiCaprio drank white wine while Archuleta rejoiced when he found papaya on the fruit platter.

Christian Slater rocked out while watching Madonna's performance of "Like a Prayer" via satellite from New York; Pussycat Doll frontwoman Nicole Scherzinger and Rose McGowan were inseparable most of the night; Rande Gerber dutifully waited for wife Cindy Crawford in the green room while she worked the phones.

"It was a great night," says the source. "It was surreal to see so many celebrities together in one place."

After-Party

For many of the stars, the fun continued at L.A.'s Tower Bar at the Sunset Tower Hotel where Clooney, DiCaprio, Witherspoon, Daniel Craig, Kid Rock, Aniston and Gerard Butler stopped by for some dinner and cocktails after the telethon.

"Everyone seemed really happy, almost giddy," an onlooker tells PEOPLE. "They were obviously celebrating the huge amount of money that they raised, and cutting loose at the same time."

Wyclef Jean Joins George Clooney To Lead MTV's 'Hope For Haiti'

Source: MTV - Wyclef Jean will join George Clooney and CNN's Anderson Cooper in hosting MTV Networks' "Hope for Haiti," the global telethon to air commercial-free across ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, BET, the CW, HBO, MTV, VH1 and CMT on Friday, January 22, at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

The telethon will be hosted by Clooney in Los Angeles, Jean in New York and Cooper in Haiti. All donations will directly benefit Oxfam America, Partners in Health, Red Cross, UNICEF and Wyclef's Yele Haiti Foundation.

"Hope for Haiti" will feature performances and celebrity appearances to be announced in the coming days, as well as live news reports from CNN. "Hope for Haiti" will also be made available to MTV Networks International and CNN International.

Facebook and MySpace have signed on as official social-media partners to help steer viewers to the telethon and drive donations.

Yele Haiti has already raised $2 million through text-message donations, the organization announced on Friday (January 15). By texting "Yele" to 501501, mobile users can donate $5 to relief efforts. Head here to learn more about what you can do to help with relief efforts.

"This is apocalypse," Jean said about the destruction in his home country. "We spent the day picking up dead bodies, all day that's what we did. There's so much bodies in the streets that the morgues are filled up, the cemeteries are filled up."

Head here to learn more about what you can do to help with earthquake-relief efforts in Haiti, and for more information, see THINK mtv.

Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men Who Stare at Goats

Wired - “More of this is true than you would believe,” we’re told, just a few minutes into the movie version of The Men Who Stare At Goats, which opens today. But how many of the film’s outlandish military research projects really happened? Turns out there’s plenty of material in the movie which sticks quite close to the truth — though reality is a bit more complicated. (Warning: minor spoilers ahead.) Psychic spies? True. The non-fiction book which serves as the movie’s basis features Colonel John B. Alexander. He served as a Special Forces commander in Vietnam and spent decades promoting the use of psychics and “remote viewers” for national security. (That is, when he wasn’t pursuing his interests in -linguistic programming, UFOs, or non-lethal weapons.) In 2007, our own Sharon Weinberger interviewed Col. Alexander in some depth on the military use of witches. “They were doing palmistry, crystal ball kinds of stuff,” he said.

Danger Room also noted Col. Alexander’s long-running feud with Armen Victorian (alias Henry Azadehdel, alias Habib Azadehdel, alias Cassava N’tumba and others), orchid smuggler, conspiracy theorist and all-round spooky character in the intelligence world.

Moving into the further reaches of the fringe we find earlier work, such as Boeing’s 60’s psychic experiments which concluded that certain subjects could force a random number generator to produce a specific number by sheer willpower. By 1985 an Army report declared that “psychokinesis could, with continued research, have a potential military value for future military operations ” and as recently as 1996 the phenomenon of eyeless vision was being investigated.

Military psychics may still be in business: a 2007 report suggested that the 9/11 attacks had been predicted some years beforehand by Remote Viewers. In the post-9/11 world where every option seemed worth exploring, it’s not implausible that some psychic spies were reactivated.

Drug experimentation? True. Troops were doused with everything from concentrated cannabis oil to LSD — at times, without their knowledge. Researchers would watch as servicemen would then “carry on conversations with various invisible people for as long as 2-3 days.” The CIA was so enamored of acid, the agency had to issue a memo instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked.

Hippie Army? True. Lt. Col. Jim Channon dove deep into the New Age movement, and came back to the military with a most alternative view of warfare — one in which troops would carry flowers and symbolic animals into battle. In the movie, Channon is played by Jeff Bridges. His First Earth Battalion is renamed the “New Earth Army.” But the ideas are the same. Much of the artwork from the New Earth manual is lifted straight from the Channon original.

Channon has been taking advantage of the publicity for his cause; this week he has a column in the Guardian newspaper, suggesting (among other things) that armies should be used for reforestation and navies to control over-fishing.

The military’s interest in Eastern and alternative practices is once again on the rise. “Warrior mind training“, apparently based on ancient Samurai techniques, is being taught at Camp Lejeune as a possible treatment for PTSD. Elsewhere the Army has a $4 million initiative exploring other approaches including Reiki, transcendental meditation and “bioenergy.” The Air Force is looking into acupuncture for battlefield pain relief.

Sound weapons? True. Unpleasant sounds and repetitive music — including the Barney theme — have been used as real-life psychological warfare and interrogation techniques. (Some of the bands involved have been less than happy about it.) Repetitive music takes a long time to be effective, but loud, discordant noise is becoming more common as a method of dispersing crowds. Danger Room’s David Axe was a test subject for the LRAD sonic blaster and reported “It was like having a hundred nagging girlfriends in my brain screaming at me”, while Sharon Weinberger tried the Inferno blaster and experienced “the most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Killing animals with telepathy? False. The most outrageous claims in the movie (and book) is that military psychics could kill goats by looking at them. Even John Alexander says this isn’t true.  “As I told Jon Ronson when the book first came out, Alexander writes, ‘He [one of the soldiers] hit the goat.’”

Goats are the one of the preferred substitutes for human targets in military testing, and there are rumors of lethal goat-zapping experiments with the Active Denial System. Special operations Command use them for training battlefield medicine – first shoot your (anesthetised) goat —  a practice which is still controversial.

In her review of the movie, Col Alexander’s wife mentions that in real life her husband can disperse clouds by looking at them — “It certainly helped during our cruise to Antarctica!” – but asserts that he has never used his powers to kill a goat. (Look at time lapse photography of clouds and cloud-busting becomes less impressive).

Psychics are notoriously prone to believing in their own powers and are often convinced that experiments have proven their abilities when the results have been equivocal. In the Guardian, Dr. Phillip Sponenberg suggests that mytonic or fainting goats plus little self-deception may be behind the supposed success of the goat-staring experiment.

However, as the First Earth Battalion’s manual makes clear, winning the psychological battle is a big part of the struggle. If your opponent believes that you can kill them with a look, then they are already half-way to being defeated. And many martial arts masters know that by overawing their students with displays that might be described as trickery, they can convince them of the value of their discipline. So it might be best not to take everything quite at face value, as Jon Ronson does in the book and Ewan Mcgregor does in the movie.

…Or maybe they really can kill goats with a look.

[Illo: First Earth Battalion manual]

Clooney e il uomo

 

George was zipping around Como again on his eco-friendly Vespa and was pulled over by the Italian coppers only to ask for his autograph.

When I visited Como a few summers back I heard a story from a local about the time George bumped a parked car while pulling into a lot. Apparently, he left a note on the car apologizing for the bumper ding and left his number, signed George Clooney. The next day, he had a brand new shiny car waiting for the victim.