Dancing With the Stars, Spray Tans, Mindless American TV

Every morning, like clockwork, I turn on my computer to do work and to write this blog. Every morning I see something on the top page of Yahoo that just makes me roll my eyes. (Yes, I know everyone uses Google, but I use Yahoo to get the financial and stock market news).


Everyday, at the top of the page, Yahoo has their 5 "hot" stories. These are always incredibly stupid and useless. Usually it is about an unusual football play (when, upon clicking, you see that it is not so unusual at all)... Or it it about some idiocy involving some Hollywood person getting a divorce or the dress s/he is wearing or something else.

Here's what was at the top of Yahoo this morning: $2.5 million dollar bra, Wal-Mart's sales, Golfer gets angry, 10 strange sports venues, Billy Crystal hosts Oscars? Hoo hum...

In a few words, God! American society is stupid! 


You know this stuff is there because Yahoo is "giving people what they want"... There is never any news about anything that actually matters.


But sometimes, even Yahoo can have something so stupid, so asinine that it irritates me to hell. Yesterday had a link to the person who does the tanning for the people on "Dancing With the Stars"! Jesus! I just have to read about that! 


The article is just Hollywood fabulous. Let me quote:


Each season of "Dancing With the Stars" features a revolving line-up of contestants and professional dancers, but one thing remains the same: spray tans are a big part of the show. And that's where Julie Nostrand, the owner of South Seas Skin Care, comes in. All season long, she's spent every Sunday flying from Loveland, Colorado, to Los Angeles, to ensure celebs look luminous in the ballroom and in front of the camera. omg! caught up with Nostrand to find out more about what the stars do to get glam.


Isn't that just ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz......... Oh, where was I?


No wonder the USA is all f'ed up. Ask Anyone says the average American watches 6.7 hours of TV a day!!!!


Average American watches 6.7 hours a day of TV.


How, in the hell could anyone spend 1/3 of their waking time on TV?


But for more, er, "serious" info let's go to our Neilsen ratings: 

According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.

The average child will watch 8,000 murders on TV before finishing elementary school. By age eighteen, the average American has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders. At a meeting in Nashville, TN last July, Dr. John Nelson of the American Medical Association (an endorser of National TV-Turnoff Week) said that if 2,888 out of 3,000 studies show that TV violence is a casual factor in real-life mayhem, "it's a public health problem." The American Psychiatric Association addressed this problem in its endorsement of National TV-Turnoff Week, stating, "We have had a long-standing concern with the impact of television on behavior, especially among children."

Millions of Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the criteria for substance abuse as defined in the official psychiatric manual, according to Rutgers University psychologist and TV-Free America board member Robert Kubey. Heavy TV viewers exhibit five dependency symptoms--two more than necessary to arrive at a clinical diagnosis of substance abuse. These include: 1) using TV as a sedative; 2) indiscriminate viewing; 3) feeling loss of control while viewing; 4) feeling angry with oneself for watching too much; 5) inability to stop watching; and 6) feeling miserable when kept from watching.

OK, 4 hours a day or 6.7 hours a day of watching TV!? Are you kidding me? Don't these people work? How can anyone, in this day and age, have the time to watch that much TV? Why would anyone want to watch that much TV? These people are truly sick, especially when they feel miserable when they cannot watch enough TV!


What's to watch on TV? Nothing good.


I heard from my friend who works at NHK that recent surveys in Japan show that the average Japanese under 30-year-old watches an average 20 minutes of TV per day.


If these statistics are true then the USA is definitely done for. People in the USA no longer read books, they don't know their basic geography. They don't know the difference between John and Yoko staying in bed to protest the war or Lenin doing the same. They think Falafel is a political party in Pakistan and the people in Eye-rack had nooklar weapons.


They think Mexico is in Central America even though Central America doesn't exist... And, they think Napoleon is an ice-cream sundae at 31 Flavors. They couldn't pick out "Grease" on a map of Europe and don't care about "Cheese eating surrender monkeys" anyway. 


As Fred Reed writes in Dark Ages:



The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?


No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millenia. They cannot. They do not even know why.


Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the frist American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.


Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.


We are witnessing the end times for the USA as we've known it for all these years.... It's too bad that, when the drunken giant in the room finally collapses, his fall is going to break everything on everyone else's tables.

Massive Anti-Government Protests in Spain Spreading to Italy! No Mention at all in Japanese Press

UPDATE! LIVE FEED OF PROTESTS IN SPAIN AT BOTTOM! 

IS THIS SITUATION IS FAST SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL? MUST SEE!

The demonstrations in Egypt weren't nearly this big! In Europe, first Greece then Iceland now Spain! Massive demonstrations and protests have broken out all over Europe. There's not a word mentioned about these huge protests in the Japanese media or in the US media either! See the live feed at the bottom of this post. These demonstrations are huge and the news about them seems to be blocked all over the world!

Twitter comment about the protests from Poland

The demonstration first started out in Madrid but have now spread to Barcelona, Valencia and other cities in Spain. The Spanish government cannot withstand this pressure. 

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE - WAKE UP

Elections are tomorrow but the protesters have said that they will continue to protest until they get what they want... I'm sure the elections will not satisfy their demands. What's next? This and events in Portugal and Italy bode ill for the Euro and the world economy. This will certainly hurt Japan's already faltering economy.

These massive demonstrations continue to grow and have turned quite ugly and violent in Greece and have now been banned in Spain (which has only served to increase their size). In Spain's case, the government has banned these gatherings, but absolutely cannot afford to send the police in and kick these people out. 


Ultimately, unemployment, taxes and austerity measures have caused these huge demonstrations that are, as one protester said, "... against the criminal behavior of the central bankers and IMF. Taking tax money from the people and giving it to rich bankers have finally made the people take to the streets...." 


Yet, this news is nowhere to be found in the Japanese news services in English or in Japanese.


I predict that this demonstration in Spain will collapse the Spanish government.


Hence this blog post.


Mish Shedlock has an excellent write up about it: 


"After passively submitting to the crisis, young Spaniards have finally taken to the street. Breaking out on the eve of municipal elections, the protests of recent days have been inspired by those in Iceland that led to the fall of the government in Reykjavik.

One morning in October 2008, Torfason Hördur turned up at what Icelanders call the “Althing”, the Icelandic parliament in the capital city, Reykjavik. By then, the country's biggest bank, the Kaupthing, had already gone into receivership and the Icelandic financial system itself was in danger of going under. Torfason, with his guitar, grabbed a microphone and invited people to talk about their dissatisfaction with the freefall of their country and to speak their minds.

A movement spawned by the Internet

But those voices calling for real democracy are not just being raised in Iceland, a country of about 320,000 inhabitants. Here in Spain, the umbrella organisation for various Spanish movements – Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) – already lists among its proposals some 40 points ranging from controlling parliamentary absenteeism to reducing military spending through to abolishing the so-called Sinde law (a law restricting on-line infringements of copyright).

Spain demonstration yesterday. This is not news in Japan!????

The demonstrations have broadened spontaneously, as was the case for those who rallied under the umbrellas of the "alternative globalisation" movements, and have evolved, one decade after the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on a more modest stage than the one demonstrators faced in the past at the World Economic Forum of the global elite in Davos, Switzerland.

All this is happening at astonishing speed via the Internet, which has amplified the echo of discontent and opened the lanes of cyberactivism to groups such as Anonymous, notable for intervening against companies like PayPal and Visa during the advocacy campaign for Wikileaks chief Julian Assange. Yet it was also there at the beginning of the revolts in the Arab world, to help people get round the censorship of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships.

“When we grow up, we want to be Icelanders!" cried one of the leaders of the organisation during the march on Sunday May 15 before a column of young – and not so young – parents and children, students and workers, the jobless and pensioners. Many Saturdays in Iceland were needed before citizens won the changes they had demanded. Spain’s first Sunday has taken place, and was followed by a Tuesday [May 17]- but there’s still a long way to go.


Protests have now spread to Italy and beyond.


Why these massive outpourings of discontent for government policies are being ignored in the Japanese press is a real curiosity. Here is a screen capture of NHK News English site. As you can see, not a word about it mentioned but there is a story of vital interest about Brazilian students sending letters to survivors of the Tohoku disaster!

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW

And here's a screen capture of the Japanese language page. Nothing about protests in Europe:

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW

Let's see: Something about the Hague Convention member states welcoming something called "the Buddha policy," Asia's largest exhibition of Naval Weapons, special trains, Japanese children in Brazil... Oh! There's demonstrations! No. No. Those are in Thailand. Nope. Nothing about demonstrations in Europe.

Quite odd, don't you think?

MISH SHEDLOCK posts this: "SOL TV has a continuous direct broadcast from Puerto del Sol in Madrid, where today's gathering has just started."

Madrid Spain time is 7 hours behind Tokyo, Japan time

More information and additional links (in Spanish) can be found here:http://www.soltv.tv/soltv2/index.html
Use Google Translate to translate any of the links. You can use a link, not just portions of text.

The summer of 2011 has started. It's going to be a very hot one too. Got gold?

Here's a map and more information about the global insurrection against banker occupation. There's even an event planned in Tokyo today!!! http://www.thetechnoant.info/campmap/