Making the Brand

Rapper and mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs almost missed the taping of the season finale of the fourth season of his show Making the Band. Apparently, according to the tabloid In Touch Weekly (1 Oct), he "arrived four hours late to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on August 26, where MTV had a helicopter to take him to the TRL studio. After seeing that the chopper didn't have captain's chairs, Diddy, 37, refused to fly the short distance into NYC."
Supposedly this is the third time he has demanded the right helicopter from MTV. According to an insider, "MTV puts up with Diddy's ridiculous behavior because his show gets very high ratings."

On the other hand

According to an editorial on NPR:

Since Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, mental health resources have been in short supply. Before the storm, there were 240 hospital psychiatric beds in Orleans Parish, but now there are only 30, and with so few hospital beds for the mentally ill, people in the city have been forced to take extreme measures.

There are accounts of emergency rooms turning away mentally ill patients despite the fact that doing so is against the law. Family members of the mentally ill plot ways to get their loved ones put in jail, because the parish prison has 60 adult psychiatric beds where patients can get consistent care.'

Of course, why bother giving those in need the help they require when there are profits to be made through television advertisements, and why not overlook such gaudy behavior becuase of that? This is a capitalist world isn't it?

-JB