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Old December 28th, 2009 #1
Alex Linder
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Brazil's Plummeting Birth Rate Linked to Influence of Soap Operas

Brazilian O Globo TV network partners with population control groups to promote contraceptive ideology

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

BRASILIA, July 28, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Brazil's plummeting birth rate, which has fallen from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 in 2000 and 1.8 in 2006, is being attributed to the influence of pro-contraceptive propaganda delivered to the public through soap operas.

At least two studies published in April of this year have concluded that the influence of soap operas created by the popular Brazilian network O Globo explain the precipitous fertility decline.

A study by the Inter-American Development Bank, "Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil", states that "women living in areas covered by the Globo signal have significantly lower fertility."

"The only other developing country comparable in size to have experienced such a sharp and generalized decline is China, where the decline was the result of deliberate government policy", states the group.

A similar study by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in Britain states that "using Census data for the period 1970-1991, we find that women living in areas covered by the Globo signal have significantly lower fertility. The effect is strongest for women of lower socioeconomic status and for women in the central and late phases of their fertility cycle, consistent with stopping behavior."

The recent data, which has surprised experts, indicates that fertility in Brazil is well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. As a result, the population is expected to age rapidly, requiring a smaller working age population to care for a growing population of retired people, as the majority of European countries are experiencing.

"More than a simple revision of the statistical calculation, the verification that Brazil will have increasingly more elderly people and fewer children sooner than was foreseen will have an impact on calculations of retirement, and will bring difficulties for public policy, which must adapt themselves to aging population structure," writes the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.

The relationship between exposure to O Globo soap operas and fertility decline is no coincidence. According to the abortionist population control organization, Population Media Center (PMC), the Brazilian television network O Globo has long had an agreement to allow the group to insert its contraceptive ideology into its soap opera programming.

"Due to the popularity of TV Globo's commercially-sponsored serialized dramas, PMC, along with Brazilian NGO Comunicarte, have an agreement with TV Globo that assists the writers of the prime-time telenovelas to weave suggested social issues into the lives of key characters," the organization states on its website.

"TV Globo inserts messages related to reproductive health and other issues in its most popular programs at no cost to Comunicarte/PMC. The air time TV Globo has donated to issues of social concern would have costs tens of millions of dollars within the last year alone. In return, PMC provides pro bono research to the writers regarding the themes they choose to incorporate into the programs."

The PMC is involved with soap opera programming in nations across the globe. It has offices in Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mexico, Niger, Nigeria, the Philippines, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Senegal, and Sudan.

The organization uses what it calls the "Sabido Method" to promote its ideology. It creates characters who embrace pro-family values, who then slowly change to the anti-family position over time as a result of experiences that occur during the course of the show's run. Audience members who may share the views of the characters at the beginning are influenced to change as well.

Brazilian pro-family activist Julio Severo, who has long decried the influence of soap operas in his country, is concerned that the plummeting birth rate will have seriously detrimental consequences in the coming decades.

"As you know, birth rates in Europe are falling, and they are facing a shortage of young workers," he told LifeSiteNews.

"But the birth rates in Brazil are falling very fast! Brazil may face mounting problems with a very large old population. In fact, I think that Brazil will suffer a worse crisis than Europe in the coming years."

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jul/08073011.html
 
Old November 10th, 2010 #2
Alex Linder
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[saw this on some site, a reader post]



Lately I've come to discover that Toyota markets AGGRESSIVELY during children's programming and that a disturbing number of impressionable children will suggest buying a Toyota product any time they overhear you discussing cars. Seriously, I was talking to my dad about when I should change the spark plugs in his car for him and was told by a nephew "Just buy a 2011 Toyota Camry (yes, he said 2011 and Toyota), it's better than a Ford Focus anyway!"
 
Old November 10th, 2010 #3
Thomas de Aynesworth
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
[saw this on some site, a reader post]



Lately I've come to discover that Toyota markets AGGRESSIVELY during children's programming and that a disturbing number of impressionable children will suggest buying a Toyota product any time they overhear you discussing cars. Seriously, I was talking to my dad about when I should change the spark plugs in his car for him and was told by a nephew "Just buy a 2011 Toyota Camry (yes, he said 2011 and Toyota), it's better than a Ford Focus anyway!"
I would spank him just for that.
 
Old December 1st, 2011 #4
Alex Linder
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[I collect examples of media influence whenever I come across them. Just in case there are any claiming that mass media do not influence people, I like to provide examples that they do, and that is the reason jews immediately target them for takeover when they infect a new country. Notice that these are mostly non-political examples of influence.]

EXAMPLES OF MASS-MEDIA INFLUENCE, BIAS, and FALSIFICATION

MASS MEDIA INFLUENCE

- promoting body piercing

In 1993, a navel piercing was depicted in MTV Video Music Awards' "Music Video of the Year", "Cryin'," which inspired a plethora of young female fans to follow suit. According to 2009's The Piercing Bible, it was this consumer drive that "essentially inspired the creation of body-piercing as a full-fledged industry."[45] Body piercing was given another media-related boost in 2004, when during a Half-time performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII singer Janet Jackson experienced a "wardrobe malfunction" that left exposed Jackson's pierced nipple.[46] Some professional body piercers reported considerable increases in business following the heavily publicized event.[46]
Body_piercing Body_piercing


CONSERVATIVE PAPER SUPPRESSES RACIAL-TRUTH

Fred Reed: When I was writing my Police Beat column for the Washington Times, any mention of racial hatred disappeared during editing.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Baltimore.shtml


MEDIA BIASED IN FAVOR OF CENTRALIZED GOVERNMENT, BIG GOVERNMENT, ZOG

Dilorenzo on mass media as pseudo-private arm of the state
http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo218.html


MASS MEDIA LIES

- 'Freshman fifteen' doesn't exist; was invented by 17 magazine
http://jezebel.com/5856305/freshmen-...d-by-seventeen
 
Old March 13th, 2012 #5
Alex Linder
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[More general piece about the medium being the message, as McLuhan used to say. That is, the nature of the medium of daily news, whether delivered in print or electronically, involves biases independent of the content of your favorite vehicles.]

Lose the News
by Chris Mayer

Today’s topic is “the news.” Specifically, how consuming it can turn your brain into soft cheese and make you a lousy thinker and investor.

I think the message here is important – and potentially life-changing. Does it sound like I am exaggerating? Hang in there and keep reading. You tell me what you think after you’ve read what I’ve got here.

The impetus for this is an essay by Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss entrepreneur, titled “Avoid News.” Dobelli makes the case that news makes us distracted, wastes time, kills deeper thinking, fills us with anxiety and is toxic to our mental health. His analogy: “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

I shared the essay with my wife Carol after I read it. It made an impact. Carol offered to cancel her electronic subscription to The New York Times if I would cancel my print subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. (We already ditched The Washington Post. I got tired of contributing to the salaries of Steven Pearlstein and Ezra Klein, who must be the worst writers on economics in America still getting paychecks.) Neither of us watches TV news.

I had to think about this offer. I love reading the newspapers every morning over breakfast and tea. I also passed on the letter to a buddy of mine who is in the business of advising institutional clients where to put their money. Dobelli had him convinced too, and the next day, he told me he left his WSJ and FT unread.

So what is Dobelli saying? Let me hit some high points.

Dobelli’s analogy with food is a good one. We know if you eat too much junk food, it makes us fat and can cause us all kinds of health problems. Dobelli makes a good case that the mind works the same way. News is brightly colored candy for the mind.

News is systematically misleading, reporting on the highly visible and ignoring the subtle and deeper stories. It is made to grab our attention, not report on the world. And thus, it gives us a false sense of how the world works, masking the truer probabilities of events.

News is mostly irrelevant. Dobelli says to think about the roughly 10,000 news stories you’ve read or heard over the past year. How many helped you make a better decision about something affecting your life? This one hit home.

Last year, I wrote 58 emails to my subscribers under the Capital & Crisis banner. I looked back and counted only five in which a news story was front and center. Even then, I used the news more to make what I was saying seem relevant and timely. But I could’ve excised the news and nothing would’ve been lost.

We get swamped with news, but it is harder to filter out what is relevant – which gets me to another point that hit home. Dobelli talks about the feeling of “missing something.” When traveling, I sometimes have this feeling. But as he says, if something really important happened, you’d hear about it from your friends, family, neighbors and/or co-workers. They also serve as your filter. They won’t tell you about the latest antics of Charlie Sheen because they know you won’t care.

Further, news is not important, but the threads that link stories and give understanding are. Dobelli makes the case that “reading news to understand the world is worse than not reading anything.” In markets, I find this is true. The mainstream press has little understanding of how markets work. They constantly report on trivia and make links where none exist for the sake of a story, or just for the sake of having something that “makes sense.”

In markets, reporters try to explain the market every day. “The market falls on Greek news” is an example. Better to not read anything if you’re going to take this kind of play-by-play seriously at all.

The fact is we don’t know why lots of things happen. We can’t know for sure why, exactly, things unfolded just as they did when they did. As Dobelli writes, “We don’t know why the stock market moves as it moves. Too many factors go into such shifts. Any journalist who writes, ‘The market moved because of X’… is an idiot.”

You contaminate your thinking if you accept the neat packages news provides for why things happen. And Dobelli has all kinds of good stuff about how consuming news makes you a shallow thinker and actually alters the structure of your brain – for the worse.

News is also costly. As Dobelli points out, even checking the news for 15 minutes three times a day adds up to more than five hours a week. For what? He uses the example of the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008. If a billion people spent one hour of their attention on the tragedy by either reading about it in the news or watching it, you’re talking about 1 billion hours. That’s more than 100,000 years. Using the global life expectancy of 66 years means the news consumed nearly 2,000 lives!

Pretty wild, right?

So what to do? Dobelli recommends swearing off newspapers, TV news and websites that provide news. Delete the news apps from your iPhone. No news feeds to your inbox. Instead, read long-form journalism and books. Dobelli likes magazines like Science and The New Yorker, for instance.

As an investor, I’d add some of mine own:

Ignore any news chatter that attempts to explain or predict what is happening in the stock market
Stop checking your stock portfolio multiple times a day
Don’t try to find reasons for every dip and rise in the prices of your stocks. Instead, accept that the vast majority of the time, nothing important happens
Ignore the drumbeat of economic news. If you must read news, try a perusal of the weekly Economist

Ignore, especially, the drumbeat of economic data – the unemployment report, GDP, the trade balance and all the rest. As Peter Lynch once wrote, “If all the economists of the world were laid end to end, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

Instead:

Read the shareholder letters of successful investors. I like reading Steve Romick at FPA, for instance. I also enjoy the shareholder letters of the Third Avenue family of funds. There are many others. Read any research such investment houses share
Spend little or no time trying to guess where you think the market and economy will go. Instead, focus on finding good deals and winning teams of entrepreneurs and investors that you can invest alongside
Listen in on the conference calls of your favorite companies and investors
Check the stories and prices on your stocks once a quarter
Read books written by successful investors. Then read them again. Some of my favorite authors include Martin Whitman, Seth Klarman, Peter Lynch, Ralph Wanger, Benjamin Graham and Joel Greenblatt. I’m sure I’m leaving a bunch out, but you can put together a truly awesome library of successful investors for little money
Read books that deepen your understanding of markets and how they work. Read Louis Lowenstein and James Grant, for two of my favorites.

My fundamental problem with the news is that it makes it seem as if important things happen every day. The vast majority of the time, nothing of any significance happens whatsoever – which is good for you. If you avoid a lot of the news, you will have a lot more time to dedicate to other things. Feed your brain good food and you’ll get better results. It seems that simple.

Dobelli himself has sworn off the news. And he reports he feels much better for it: “less disruption, more time, less anxiety, deeper thinking and more insights.” I can’t do the whole idea justice here. If you want to read Dobelli, check out the full essay here.

Print it out. Turn off the smartphone. Stop checking email for 25 minutes. And just read it. Be forewarned: It might just change your life.

March 13, 2012

http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/mayer4.1.1.html
 
Old August 12th, 2012 #6
Alex Linder
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Family's anguish as son, 14, dies while playing 'choking game' as deadly internet craze sweeps America

By Snejana Farberov

PUBLISHED: 20:37 EST, 11 August 2012 | UPDATED: 08:25 EST, 12 August 2012
Comments (1)

Life cut short: Isaiah Shell, 14, was found dead in the basement of his home after playing a choking game to get high

A risky game teenagers play to get high has claimed the life of a 14-year-old boy from Salem, Indiana, last week, according to authorities.

The coroner has determined that Isaiah Shell died last Friday from accidental positional asphyxiation as a result of the choking game.

Isaiah should have started his first day of eighth grade at Salem Middle School on Thursday. Instead, his heart-broken parents were left planning his funeral, according to the station WLKY.

‘He never would have ever wanted any of us to hurt like we hurt,’ said the victim’s mother, Maggie Shell. ‘I know this wasn't something he meant to do.’

Experts said the deadly game, which has become an Internet craze thanks to numerous video demonstrations posted online, involves intentionally trying to choke oneself to attain a brief and intense high produced when oxygen intake is decreased.

‘I've heard of it, but I never thought someone like Isaiah would ever play that game,’ Isaiah’s sister, Rhonda Shell, told WLKY.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...akes-hold.html
 
Old August 13th, 2012 #7
Alex Linder
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The Twilight effect: How Bella and Jacob have become some of our most popular baby names

- Bella has entered the top 100 girls names for the first time and George moved into 7th place in the name chart
- Harry and Amelia have knocked Oliver and Olivia from the 2010 top spot as Britain's most popular names
- Eliza and Evelyn, Jenson and Arthur have also grown in popularity

By Emily Allen

13 August 2012

Bella and Jacob were among the nation's most popular baby names last year, possibly inspired by characters from the hit blockbuster book and film franchise Twilight.

Bella, the name of the heroine in the series staring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, entered the top 100 girls names chart for the first time, at 69, while Isabella made the top 10.

Meanwhile, Jacob, the name of Taylor Lautner's character Jacob Black, has replaced George in the 10 most popular names for boys climbing five places to number seven from 12 in 2010.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...aby-names.html
 
Old August 27th, 2012 #8
Alex Linder
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Montana man trying to create Bigfoot sighting in “Ghillie suit” struck and killed by cars

By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, August 27, 9:18 PM

KALISPELL, Mont. — A man dressed in a military-style “ghillie” suit and apparently trying to provoke reports of a Bigfoot sighting in northwest Montana was struck by two cars and killed, authorities said.

The man was standing in the right-hand lane of U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell on Sunday night when he was hit by the first car, according to the Montana Highway Patrol. A second car hit the man as he lay in the roadway, authorities said.

Flathead County officials identified the man as Randy Lee Tenley, 44, of Kalispell. Trooper Jim Schneider said motives were ascertained during interviews with friends, and alcohol may have been a factor but investigators were awaiting tests.

“He was trying to make people think he was Sasquatch so people would call in a Sasquatch sighting,” Schneider told the Daily Inter Lake (http://bit.ly/PWJvA5) on Monday. “You can’t make it up. I haven’t seen or heard of anything like this before. Obviously, his suit made it difficult for people to see him.”

Ghillie suits are a type of full-body clothing made to resemble heavy foliage and used to camouflage military snipers.

“He probably would not have been very easy to see at all,” Schneider told KECI-TV (http://bit.ly/PkdWMO ).

Tenley was struck by vehicles driven by two girls, ages 15 and 17, who were unable to stop in time, authorities said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...00b_story.html

No way this idiot does something like this if he doesn't see all the bigfoot and alien shows on tv.
 
Old January 14th, 2014 #10
Alex Linder
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we tend to believe what we hear in mass media - it's just easier

http://lifehacker.com/5953837/why-yo...or-watch-on-tv
 
Old July 15th, 2014 #11
Alex Linder
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Lots of parents naming kids Elsa after Disney character
http://gawker.com/everyone-is-naming...-fr-1597388390
 
Old November 11th, 2014 #12
Alex Linder
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“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” -Napoleon Bonaparte
 
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