Right on, Sparrownoid. It's empty distraction. I regard the entertainment media and TV in general as far sicker and more destructive to the human race than Michael Jackson will ever be. They suck on him and anyone else that they can find to pull in viewers, just like some huge vampire sucking on its victim.

So they distributed TVs in Afghanistan, did they? How kind of them! And here I have been, in the heart of the affluent society, deliberately choosing not to have a TV for the past 15 years.

It's like Orwell's 1984, only more subtle. The brutality is a little less obvious. The poisons are coated with sugar. The Newspeak is so patently absurd that anything Bush says about Saddam could just as well be spoken by Saddam about Bush. Even more so, in fact, specially when it comes to weapons of mass destruction and warmongering.

It doesn't matter about Michael Jackson. He's just one incredibly lost soul with a lot of money. But it does matter that the media are brainwashing and sedating everyone on a daily basis and have been doing so for decades.