Year-End Progress Update and 2024 Plans
What better time to update my blog than the last day of the year? Allow me to reflect on the last 12 months to see if I accomplished anything of worth.
World Opinion
Politics, Conspiracies, New World Order
Do Suicide Reports Increase Suicides?
Nearly two years ago, in “Copycat Japanese“, I wrote about how I thought the media’s sensationalistic reporting of teenage suicides was to blame for spurring on more suicides. Recently, this suspicion was confirmed when I found out about researcher David Phillips’ studies from the 1970’s that showed a significant increase in not only suicides, but also car accidents and plane crashes in the days after a suicide is reported in […]
Who Owns Japan’s Media?
The U.S media is often criticized for ignoring major news stories or covering them with obvious bias, and more people are becoming aware that this is because the media is owned by just five major corporations – General Electric, Time Warner, Viacom, The Walt Disney Co. and News Corporation. The media is an incredibly powerful tool for social control, so I’ve been wondering if a similar situation exists in Japan… […]
Don’t Promise Your Kids a Toy this Xmas
I’m still reading through books on influence and persuasion, and in particular, how companies sucker consumers into buying their latest products. Here’s a tip I learned that I’d like to share with parents who might soon be asking what their children want for Christmas. Christmas sales and the after-shock The run up to Christmas is booming business for toy stores, but what happens in the couple of months after they […]
Cell Phones Double the Risk of Cancer
I take anything the “news” tells me with a pinch of salt these days. Very little of it is actually useful or even important. If a murderer took his own life after that of his victim’s, then why report the crime on TV? Since the criminal is no longer a threat, reporting the story is not so much of a public service announcement, but more a sick form of entertainment. […]