Calling All Disinfotainers

For the next three days, Tuesday, April 26-29, I'm going to be attending an incredible seminar presented by The Media Center at the American Press Institute. It's called Media Opportunities and Strategies for the Mobile Broadband Generation and I'll be staying at the Westin Bonaventure. Complete report next week. If you're in LA, you can reach me at 213-624-1000. Come by. Bring drugs.

In case I'm given the opportunity to speak (unlikely), this is what I'll say...

    I'm not interested in a new delivery system that delivers the same old crap. I'm looking to escape from the same old crap. I want you to give me something I can't get anywhere else, otherwise the wheel is spinning but the hamster's dead.
    I represent the free press, in that I put out a weekly newspaper and nobody tells me what to put in it. I've done a lot of research and come to this conclusion.
    There is no vast right wing conspiracy. There is no vast left wing conspiracy. There IS a conspiracy to keep the debate right vs. left when the real battle is up vs. down. The powerful vs. the powerless.
    In the battle between the powerful and the powerless, the greatest weapon the powerless have is a free press. The ability to tell the world what's happening. And right now, the Russian newspaper Pravda, which used to be held up in ridicule as nothing more than the obvious propaganda arm of the Communist party, is currently a freer press than the Washington Post. The greatest global display of actual Democracy in progress this year is not the elections in Iraq, and certainly not the elections here. The greatest global display of actual democracy is a newspaper in South Korea called ohmynews in which more than 20,000 readers sift through all the news and vote on which 10 stories make the cover. This beats Google's news service all to crap. You can tell the difference between decisions made by people vs. decisions made by machines. Wouldn't it be cool to set up something like that in America? Free idea. Do it.
    Back when there was nothing but radio and broadcast TV, the FCC controlled everything. When cable showed up, it was an end-run around the FCC. It was unregulated, no censorship, and just a monthly fee instead of commercials. That's how it was for a while but look at it now. We did the end run around commercial television, but strangely cable TV has just as many commercials as broadcast TV, and they STILL charge for it. How did they do that? Like I said, the wheel is spinning but the hamster's dead.
    Why am I here? I'm looking for someone. I'm not looking for someone who's goal is to sell out to Rupert Murdoch. I'm looking for someone who's goal is to TAKE ON Rupert Murdoch. To me, the only difference between Rupert Murdoch and Monica Lewinski is they're sucking the dicks of different presidents.
    I want to create something which Time/Warner would only buy to bury. They know how powerful the press is, they know it's the only weapon we have to keep the powerful from exploiting the powerless to death. You don't have to be smart to be powerful, you only have to be rich. You can get rich by just stealing everything that's useful and blowing up everything else. You can get away with absolutely anything, the worst possible human atrocities, as long as no one is paying attention. So I'm asking you to pay attention. In 1985, there were 50 companies who owned media outlets. Now there are only six who own absolutely everything. As soon as they sniff a free press, they buy it up and turn it into bologna.
    This just happened to me. I moved to the Coachella Valley just as The Desert Post Weekly was starting out. It was a genuine alternative to the only daily, the Desert Sun, serving Palm Springs and very Republican, backing Mary Bono all the way. I got a weekly column in the Desert Post Weekly that was a hit, ran for a year, then the whole editorial staff was replaced by a crew that turned it into another local throwaway, things to do in town, local matters. Far from being an alternative to the Desert Sun, the Desert Post Weekly now has reprints of articles originally in the Desert Sun. In just a couple months, I went from a weekly column to "please stop submitting your stuff to us. We're not a real newspaper any more."
    This didn't happen because I'm getting worse at what I do. It happened because I'm getting better. Once you're out there and people learn to trust you, the most amazing things just show up in the mail. I've got hundreds of sources around the world, little old me, my inbox packed every day with people with stories that aren't getting out, people with photographs that expose lies.
    Remember when Israel started fencing off the Palestinians? It was all over the news. "In order stave off terrorism, Israel is building a fence around the Palestinians," then they showed a news clip of a fence going up. They showed it over and over for a couple days. It's all the US public saw and they didn't care. Who could disapprove of a fence? To stop those horrible suicide bombings? Sounds like a good idea.
   The very next day I got an email from Israel showing a Palestinian standing next to a cement wall 40 feet tall, a prison wall, more intimidating than the one that used to be in Berlin, completely different from the "fence" they were showing us on TV. I was the first to post those pictures in America. A year later, the media started referring to it as what it really was, a wall, not a fence, but the damage had been done. The American public, who actually paid for the construction of it by the way, thought they were just getting a fence but the Israelis delivered a wall. Isn't that nice?
    TV makes up your mind for you. They want you to care about Terri Schiavo so they show you endless clips of her sitting up in bed and smiling, without bothering to mention that the footage is three years old.
    They are deliberately creating a universal disconnect. They're creating the New Dumb, people who are so overloaded with information that they can't be bothered to check things out, a generation of the gullible who are swallowing enormous lies at a rapidly accelerating pace.
    Colin Powell gave a speech at the UN. Turned out to be bullshit but at the time, it was presented as gold. Nobody questioned a thing until a year later, after the war had started, when the bullshit was so high even Tom Brokaw couldn't ignore it. So you think hey, the press works, the truth came out. Only one problem. Within one hour of Colin Powell's speech, I had already found incontrovertible proof that he was lying, and I said so in my paper that week. What the hell took ABC a year? They've got access to the same information I do. They could have said "Colin Powell lies to UN," but they didn't. There's only one difference between us. I don't work for a major corporation so I can say whatever the hell I want. They can't stop me because they don't own me.
    A free press needs protection and you can give it. A free press that monitors the actions of the powerful cannot be owned by the people being monitored. A free press owned by the powerful becomes a propaganda machine for the powerful. Not one newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst accepted advertising from or even bothered to review a little film called Citizen Kane and they successfully buried it, at least for a little while. And the same thing is happening now, every single day. Premature burial of stories. The modern Hearsts are bigger and powerful and unscrupulous beyond imagination. And they own everything.
    Except you. All of you here today with your new technology, are in the remarkable position to do an end run around the big six who control everything. Time Warner, Walt Disney, Bertelsmann AG, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch, and NBC/Universal, owned by General Electric. If you use your new delivery systems just to regurgitate what we're already force fed every day, it will be a gigantic wasted opportunity. You're powerful. Exert your power. The first amendment. Use it or lose it.

Gallery of the Week

Pretty goddam fancy watermelon slicing

Stupid Answers of the Week

Michael Jackson may have to sell off portions of the Beatle catalogue to pay for his legal fees. What songs would be the most appropriate?

Baby's In Black
Cry Baby Cry
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey
The Fool on the Hill
I'm a Loser
It's All Too Much
I've Got a Feeling
Misery
Money (That's What I Want)
Not a Second Time
Please Please Me
Run for Your Life
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
This Boy
We Can Work it Out
You Can't Do That
You Never Give Me Your Money
Your Mother Should Know
You've Got to Hide Your Love Away
- Lynette

I Want To Hold Your Gland
- Dave Cogan
P.S. MD, this is my pick for song title, not a personal request!

Songs in the catalog recorded by other artists but not The Beatles, like Lennon/McCartney's "I Wanna Hold Your Gland," [where've I heard that before?] recorded by Doug Clark & the Hot Nuts in 1965; "I Read the News Today - Oh, Boys!" recorded by The Four Freshmen in 1967; "All You Need is Lube," recorded by Johnny Mathis in 1969; "Norwegian Woody (This Boy Has Flown)," recorded by The Four Tops in 1970, and "Tomorrow Neverland Comes," recorded by The Sex Pistols in 1979.
- RSJ

everybody's 
got something to hide except
me and my monkey
- dburke11 (still in fucking haiku mode)

Stupid Question of the Week

Out the door. Truncated issue. No time to come up with a stupid question. Whatayuh gonna do about it?

Send your answers to stupidquestion@disinfotainmenttoday.com.

E-Mail of the Week

When I discovered that the United States government was seriously developing artificial limbs, I wrote to the man in charge of the project, Geoff Ling, saying...

Concerning your prosthetic arm system, I'd like to recommend you find this Iraqi child and help him out.

The reply...

Dear Michael,
Thank you.
V/R
Geoff Ling, MD
Colonel, Medical Corps, US Army
DARPA

Quiz of the Week

A bill to shield oil companies from lawsuits for contaminating the nation's water supplies, exempt every state in the eastern half of the country from smog cleanup deadlines in the Clean Air Act, undermine the ability of natural resource agencies to protect fish and wildlife, prevent states from protecting their own shorelines, and put new limits on the National Environmental Policy Act is:

A) The National Air and Water Contamination Bill 
B) The Wildlife Reduction and Coastal Endangerment Act 
C) The National Energy Bill 

The manufacturer's brochure for which of the following weapons states that jet engines and helicopters are likely targets for the weapon, making it capable of destroying a multi-million-dollar aircraft with a single hit delivered to a vital area? 

A) The cannon mounted on the Abrams tank the U.S. Army is using in Iraq. 
B) The antiaircraft battery deployed by the National Guard to defend Washington. 
C) The .50 caliber sniper rifle the NRA wants to legalize as a standard hunting weapon. 

Hint: heads up, Bambi.

- Ironic Times -

Sophistimicated Doowacky of the Week

If you're trapped on a desert island, or just stoned, 
all you need is a Coke can and a chocolate bar to start a fire.

Don't Take My Word For It

     "For several days in April, this address, www.walmart-foundation.org, hosted a parody of the Wal-Mart Foundation's website. I created a derivative work by changing all of the text and several of the images from the original site. The goal was to make the site look like it could be a real site from a company like Wal-Mart, but have text that was so ridiculous that anyone who read it would realize that it was absurd. If anyone believed it to be a real Wal-Mart site, that is only a testament to the degree of absurdity that exists within corporate America today. 
    "I believe that this site constituted fair use of the copyrighted material from the original website; it was only a couple of graphics, and it was done for the purpose of parody. The text on the site was all designed to highlight problems with the growing influence of large multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart. It contained many facts that were damning of Wal-Mart's labor, trade, and environmental impact. I engaged in a form of 'identity correction.' The Wal-Mart Foundation's main purpose is to generate positive public relations for the Wal-Mart brand name and logo; it does so by donating small amounts here and there in an attempt to behave like a philanthropy.
    "As the Wal-Mart Foundation would never tell you that their goal was to help improve the brand name image of the stores, I figured I would 'correct' this through parody."
- Wal-Mart and the DMCA team up to shut down parody website -

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
- Gandhi -

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
- Umberto Eco: Travels in Hyperreality -

"Egotist, n.: a person of low taste - more interested in himself than in me."
- Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary -

"First of all, do not predefine understanding, and do not make a principle of non-understanding."
- Ying-an -

"Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people."
- Robert Benchley -

"If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking."
- Lyndon B. Johnson -

"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false."
- Paul Johnson -

"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."
- Abraham Lincoln -

"Confusion is always the most honest response."
- Marty Indik -

"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution."
- Bertrand Russell -

"We must control anger and hatred in ourselves. And as we learn to remain in peace, then we can demonstrate in society in a way that makes a real statement for world peace. If we ourselves remain always angry and then sing world peace, it has little meaning. So, you see, first our individual self must learn peace. This we can practice. Then we must teach the rest of the world."
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama -

"O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet."
- Saint Augustine -

"Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office."
- David Broder -

"I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it."
- Garrison Keillor -

"A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life."
- Robertson Davies -

"Five years ago I returned to my dad. When I saw him, I became very happy. I could hug him, I could see my little brother. That was the happiest day of my life."
- Elian Gonzalez from Cuban Castaway Elian Gonzalez Thanks Americans for Helping Him Return Home to Cuba by Vanessa Arrington -

"Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature."
- Agnes Repplier -

    "Should I tether my camel or trust in God alone?" a man asked the Prophet.
   "First tether your camel, then trust in God," the Prophet replied.
- Qushayri: al-Risalat al-Qushayriyya -

    "Suppose a goldsmith takes his tongs and puts some gold into the furnace to melt it. If he blows on the heat too much, it will get too hot, but if he sprinkles too much water, it will cool down. If he constantly takes it out and looks at it, it will not reach refinement. But if he does all these things from time to time, aware of the nature of gold, it will become easily molded and bright.
   "In the same way, there are three qualities that a practitioner should pay attention to - concentration, determination, and equanimity. If he pays the right attention to these at the right time, then his mind will become like gold, pliant and brilliant and pure."
- Anguttara Nikaya -

"Help thy brother's boat across and thine own has reached the shore."
- Hindu Proverb -

"A duck walks into a 7-11 and says 'Give me some chapstick, put it on my bill!' But the cash register attendee doesn't speak English and cannot understand him. He does, however, question whether his God is punishing him because as all people know, ducks cannot speak, so this hallucination must be punishment for a horrid misdeed. The employee breaks down into tears and begins reciting prayer. The duck, slightly miffed, walks out, pondering why he'd need chapstick anyway, since he has no lips." 
- Jokes with realistic endings -

"To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else." 
- Joseph Heller: Catch-22 -

    "Two weeks after credit card companies announced they would no longer accept payment for tobacco products bought online, scores of Internet cigarette merchants have effectively lost the means to do business profitably, and are either limping along or have shut down their operations altogether.
   "Visa International, MasterCard International, American Express, eBay's PayPal service and others cut off the online tobacconists last month after being told by a coalition of states and representatives of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that virtually all such sales were illegal. Government officials said that merchants had not done enough to comply with age verification practices or to register sales with governments to insure the collection of state taxes."
- Bob Tedeschi: Trouble for Online Vendors of Cigarettes -

"Yeah, there lots of kids with credit cards buying cigarettes online."
- Jay, the Wonder Panda -

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
- Mark Twain -

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live." 
- Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - 

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
- Thomas Jefferson - 

"God will forgive me. It's his profession."
- Heinrich Heine - 

"There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible." 
- Sean O'Casey: The Plough and The Stars - 

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."
- Voltaire -

"When does he start up this stupid little network? August? Yip yip yip yahoo. You know what Gore said about this? It's going to be liberal. It's going to reflect the point of view of young people. What the hell is that, Al? What the hell is the point of view of young people? Blow jobs, that's what they're doing out there. They're out there getting oral sex all day long, that's what they're talking about. Al made sure that's become the number one sport in high school today. So, I guess you're going to have a BJ network out there, Al, is that what you're going to do? You're going to call your network the oral sex channel out there, start competing with MTV?"
- Rush Limbaugh -

    "Entomologists Quentin Wheeler and Kelly B. Miller, who recently had the task of naming 65 newly discovered species of slime-mold beetles, named three species after the president, vice president and defense secretary.
   "The monikers: Agathidium bushi Miller and Wheeler, Agathidium cheneyi Miller and Wheeler, and Agathidium rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler.    "According to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the first word of a new species is its genus; the second word must end in 'i' if it's named after a person; and the final part of the name includes the person or persons who first described the species."
- CNN: Bush has slime-mold beetle named after him -

"There are three side effects of acid. Enhanced long term memory, decreased short term memory, and I forget the third."
- Timothy Leary - 

"No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak." 
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -

"K2 reacted harshly to the news by claiming that Everest doesn't put in as many hours in the gym as it used to, and is taunting the giant peak to get tested to prove itself clean. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) says he will use his influence in a manner similar to that in which he got baseball to come up with a tough testing program. McCain will send a team of analysts to examine the runoff of Everest's glaciers to see if the mountain has been doping. However, there has been no mention of any type of punishment should tests come back positive."
- listerplus: Mount Everest Getting Taller? -

    "Marina Bai, a Russian astrologist, filed a lawsuit last month with the Presnensky district court in Moscow, demanding that the U.S. space agency call off its $311 million Deep Impact mission. As reported in MosNews.com, Bai is also asking for 8.7 billion rubles ($311 million) in compensation for moral damages.
    "'The actions of NASA infringe upon my system of spiritual and life values, in particular on the values of every element of creation, upon the unacceptability of barbarically interfering with the natural life of the universe, and the violation of the natural balance of the Universe,' Bai said in her claim.
   "Deep Impact, which is already in space, is scheduled to collide with Comet 9P/Tempel 1 on July 4th of this year. The spacecraft will be used to dig out a crater in the comet. Scientists will then hope to learn what a typical comet is made of."
- Russian Astrologist Sues NASA -

"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few." 
- George Bernard Shaw -

"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."
- Bertrand Russell -

"Now that the credit card companies have their bankruptcy bill it makes me wonder if they are going to be happy with what they got. This bill might result in people changing their behavior and becoming more responsible. And what do I mean by more responsible? I mean - people spending less money. No more impulse buying. After all - if you are going to protect yourself against bankruptcy, it means that you are going to be a lot more careful in your spending. The bottom line is - it's going to hit the economy hard,. The law goes into effect in October and that's when people will really stop spending money,. We'll see if they are happy come Christmas. Looks to me like Christmas has been canceled."
- Marc Perkel -

    "The biggest offenders are cell phones... because they pose a hazardous 'double whammy' to the environment.
   "To build them, gold and other metals must be extracted from mines in western states, in Peru, Turkey, Tanzania and other countries. The Environmental Protection Agency ranks hard-rock mining as the nation's leading toxic polluter.
   "Then, at the end of their life cycles, many phones end up in landfills, where they may leak lead and other heavy metals that could pollute nearby ground water.
   "Americans have about 500 million obsolete, broken or otherwise unused cell phones, and about 130 million more are added each year - the equivalent of 65,000 tons of waste, according to the EPA.
   "Less than 2 percent are recycled - usually refurbished and resold to consumers in Latin America and Asia, or disassembled for gold and other parts, according to EARTHWORKS."
- Rachel Konrad: Activists target 'e-waste' - Chemicals in high-tech electronic gear becoming huge environmental hazard -

    "If your calling is journalism, you enter the job market at the same time that the long and honorable history of American journalism is traveling through the digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry. But at the same time, you arrive on the scene just at the moment something broader, faster, and perhaps more democratic than the invention of journalism is emerging...
   "OhmyNews is a website in South Korea that employs 26,000 citizen-reporters. Those citizen-reporters and their readers vote on which articles should appear on the front page. It's wildly popular, particularly among the young cybergeneration. Earlier this year, OhmyNews did something remarkable. The candidate that was favored by many of their readers and reporters was behind in the polls in the days before Korea's Presidential election, and the exit-polls in the early hours showed him losing. A call to action on OhmyNews led to readers sending nearly a million emails to their friends, urging them to get out and vote, along with an uncounted number of text messages to their friends' telephones. That unprecedented online get-out-the-vote effort tipped the election - and the first interview President-elect Roh gave was to OhmyNews...
   "Young people in every part of the world are using and inventing blogs, wikis, mobile messaging, desktop video, digital music, online animation, social software... You can - you MUST - innovate faster than your ability to innovate can be enclosed by laws, regulations, and technological fences." 
- Howard Rheingold: commencement speech at Stanford University -

"I was recently on a panel with the head of USAToday.com. He said they have 300 million pageviews a month. I said that's good; we have 400 million. Then he said he had 180 people on staff. I said I have one part-time person who helps me with the servers. There's something new going on here. It's not about broadcast, it's about interaction."
- Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales -

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." 
- Oscar Wilde - 

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."
- Albert Einstein -

"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."
- Quentin Crisp - 

"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
- P. J. O'Rourke -

    "Media scholar Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writes that the purpose of journalism is to perform three tasks: to monitor the powerful, to winnow the truth from the lies, and to present a range of informed positions on important issues. But the journalism produced by media conglomerates does the opposite. The junk news they broadcast is intended to protect the wealthy and idiotize the masses while trivializing crucially important issues...
   "The people who run these companies and decide what we need to know are some of the wealthiest men on earth. As CEOs of enormous businesses, their job is sell a journalism that is the cheapest to produce, appeals to the largest market, and brings in the most profit. These values are not compatible with good journalism. Instead of thoughtful reports on global warming or the link between military spending and the national deficit, the news they give us is dominated by Michael Jackson or whoever the freak du jour happens to be."
- Rod Helle: Are you an idiot? -

"The Council of Trent was a Catholic council held from 1545-1563 in an attempt to destroy the progress of the Protestant Reformation. This council denied every Reformation doctrine, including Scripture alone and grace alone. Trent hurled 125 anathemas (eternal damnation) against Bible-believing Christians. These proclamations and anathemas were fleshed out in the murderous persecutions vented upon Bible-believing Christians by Rome, and the solemn fact is that the Council of Trent has never been annulled. The Vatican II Council of the mid-1960s referred to Trent dozens of times, quoted Trent's proclamations as authority, and reaffirmed Trent on every hand. The New Catholic Catechism cites Trent no less than 99 times. There is not the slightest hint that the proclamations of the Council of Trent have been abrogated by Rome. At the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII stated, 'I do accept entirely all that has been decided and declared at the Council of Trent.' Every cardinal, bishop and priest who participated in the Vatican II Council signed a document affirming Trent."
- Declarations of the Council of Trent -

"If anyone denies that in the sacrament of the most Holy Eucharist are contained truly, really and substantially the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ, but says that He is in it only as in a sign, or figure or force, LET HIM BE ANATHEMA"
- Canons on the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, Canon 1 -

"Anathema: 1 a : one that is cursed by ecclesiastical authority -- Merriam-Webster dictionary -

"So let me get this straight. Communion wafers and wine don't symbolize the body and blood of Christ but are the ACTUAL body and blood of Christ? And anyone who disagrees is cursed? You'd have to be utterly and totally insane to believe such a thing."
- Jesus H. Christ -

Everything Else

No one person has ever achieved rulership over the whole planet. Which states have come closest? Here is a table of the 25 largest states and empires to have held sway over the earth at one time or another. #1? The British Empire between 1918 and 1922. #17? The Roman Empire in the early 2nd century.

Nick Anderson won a well deserved Nobel Prize for his editorial cartoons. Check out a gallery of his work.

You may wonder why there's a Pope in the first place. Here's the answer.

Gays take note. These guys are coming. Seriously bad.

Learn the facts behind Time Magazine's malignant Ann Coulter cover story.