Note: Google has changed its blogging software, Blogger, in incomprehensible ways, as has destroyed paragraf breaks in the HTML screen I usually work in. I have had to use a different way of doing things to try to work around the problem, and have complained to the 'geniuses' at Google.

Wasting Our Time on B.S. Three of the 'big stories' on NBC Nitely News today were the (1) trivial sex scandal involving the Secret Service, (2) an 'alarming' spike in measles: the U.S. went from 60 cases a year to 222 a year of this trivial infection that produces essentially NO consequences for anyone — in a Nation of 312 MILLION people!; and (3) the retirement of a women's basketball coach. Who the HELL needs to know any of this? Why are the media wasting our time on such NONSENSE?
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This is supposed to be not only the world's only superpower, but also a democracy, in which an informed citizenry is expected to demand intelligent public policy from government, corporate powerhouses, and social institutions, affecting not just the United States but also the entire planet. How are we supposed to make decisions on public policy when the media spend the bulk of their time on idiot drivel?
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Who CARES if a basketball coach retires — esp. a women's basketball coach in Tennessee, not even in a major city? And why is she receiving a medal from the President? Absurd. So she did some work on publicizing Alzheimer's "disease" — which is not a "disease" at all, in that it is not caused by a microbe and is not transmissible — so what? Did she find a cure? No. Why are nobodies being given Presidential medals for nonsense?
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This country's values are skewed toward madness. Media waste hundreds of television hours a week on empty-headed, useless celebrities, whose hollow, useless lives have nothing to do with the lives of the rest of us. Why?
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These "bread and circuses" distractions keep us from informing ourselves on things that matter. While morons are watching make-believe people — whose vacuous fame is predicated on playing "make believe" for scads of money, and who present a largely fake persona to the public — the rich export our jobs, cheat on their taxes, and yearly make the bulk of us ever poorer so they can become ever more obscenely rich. Coincidence? It might be, if the media wasting our time were owned by nonprofit, publicly dedicated citizens' organizations. But they're not. The major media are huge corporations owned and controlled by the rich. Get the picture?
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The magical takeover of every part of society by the rich has been accomplished by the same thing that makes all "magic" possible: diversion and distraction. Keep everyone's attention on one, inconsequential thing, while you carry off your trick of stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from their pockets, and reduce them, bit by bit, to penury.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM