Issue #81
is brought to you by...

Fwiendship
 


BELIEVE IT OR ELSE
Posted November 24, 2003
 

Tips on Junk Calls

Here are our answers to all the annoying calls and junk mail we receive. 

1) Three Little Words That Work: "Hold On, Please..." Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt. 

Then when you eventually hear the phone company's "beep-beep-beep" tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task. These three little words could help eliminate telephone soliciting. 

2) Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end?  This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to determine the best time of day for  a "real" sales person to call back and get someone at home. 

What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Since doing this, my phone calls have decreased dramatically. 

3) Another Good Idea: When you get "ads" enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these "ads" with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away. 

When you get those "pre-approved" letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope. Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? 

It costs them more than the regular 37 cents postage "IF" and when they receive them back.  It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes. Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back! (If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you send them.) 

You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! Eventually, the banks and credit card companies will begin getting their own junk back in the mail. Let's let them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they're paying for it...Twice! Let's help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that's why they need to increase postage costs again. You get the idea!

- Thanks Ken Rubin -

Gallery of the Week


I CIRCUMCISE TEENAGERS
Right hand forms scissors, 
index finger of left hand 
mirrors penis.
I'M AN IDIOT
Confusing, incoherent 
undulation of fingers just 
below chin.
I CLIPPED THE LOCK WITH
BOLT CUTTERS AND STOLE
YOUR STEREO
Jerky cutting motion of 
chain around garage door.
I WORK AT WAL-MART
Stretched, forced smile with 
forefingers of each hand.
Surely you've got something better to do than memorize the brand new Big Book of Sign Language.

Scumbags of the Week

NBC Network Programmers

    I'm up at 5AM to get the kids to school, so 9PM is bedtime. Anything after that is recorded and saved for the next day.
  CSI starts at 9PM on CBS, ER starts at 10PM on NBC, and that's the way things should be on Thursday nights on American television. Two of TV's best shows, one right after another, permanently stored in the satellite box and the VCR for regular recording. I've seen every episode of both.
   But now NBC has fucked it up. CSI has knocked ER out of the number one spot. NBC doesn't want people switching from CSI to ER, they want people tuned only to NBC from 9PM to 11PM, so what have they done? They've made it difficult, if not impossible for people like me to record both shows. How? They moved ER up a minute. That's right, ER doesn't start at 10PM any more, it starts at 9:59PM, and that one weasely minute makes all the difference.
    If you check off ER on a satellite (and I presume cable) box, it's IMPOSSIBLE to also check off CSI. CSI is programmed from 9PM to 10PM, so if you try to click it, you can't. Instead, because of that little minute overlap, you get a message saying you've already clicked something for that time period. It's literally impossible to click both CSI and ER. You've got to choose between them, even though they're not opposite each other.
   So a hearty "fuck you," NBC. Those are rotten tactics and no amount of salve will ease the pain of the burning pitchfork marks on your lard laden buttocks when you sink to the fiery depths of perpetual damnation where you will be made to suffer through your own programming for eternity on a small black and white TV with bad reception because hell doesn't get cable OR satellite.

Christmas Gift from Hell

Just one of many needlepoint kits available at Subversive Cross Stitch.

Inadvertent Philosophical Statement of the Week

Equal opportunity
At the start of the game, every player should have an equal chance of winning. In particular, the first player should have neither an advantage nor a disadvantage over the rest of the field.
Surprise
A game should be rich in surprises. Repetition in sequence, progress, and events should be strictly avoided.
Winning chances
A similar rule applies to the end of a game. Every player must have at least a theoretical possibility of winning until the very end. This possibility might be infinitesimal, but it must be present.
No "kingmaker effect"
A game loses its appeal if, at any stage, a player who no longer has any hope of winning can somehow determine the winner. This problem arises primarily in strategy games.
No early elimination
All players should be involved in the game until it's almost over. No one should be eliminated until the very end.
 



Mr. Conspiracy Says...

What? 2003 is almost over and you still haven't read The Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2002?

It wasn't Oswald, Johnson, Castro, or the CIA. Read Mae Brussell's The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.

I Feel So Much Safer Now

 
Richard Perle has admitted that the US invasion of Iraq was illegal.
Insane E-mail of the Week
 
    I have no children. I will not suck up to the most corrupt nation on the planet. I will not go along just because my evil grandfather served in WWII without question. I know when it comes to "corrupt" Muslim governments that they could never get away with child protective services. I know that unless you are a nazi-american suck-up like yourself, I would never get my children back. That is why you evil bastards will not ever get my progeny. I know that in Iraq before your evil presents that I could speak out, to defend the souls of children who are not brainwashed by the antichrist George Washington. You are a corporate fascist medical military industrial complex. You will be destroyed and I will help with the pen, or die trying. I have just completed a statistical design that will establish a relationship between adoption slavery and psychiatric fraud. In America you get your knee broken by the govt. In Iraq it is a fingernail. You call it media boy. Maybe when your children are in chains you will finally realize you have been duped. I guess you do not want to be bothered with knowing the fact that the money to pay for you legal fight against your govt. had to come from the backs of Chinese children. When I get the U.N. to help me kick down the doors to expose the raping of American children by their govt. I guess at that point you will call me a trader. I will trade against anything that sells the souls of children. Except those that happen to be children of this corporate police state.
   P.S.  This would be written regardless what the satanic Bill of Rights says. The evil founding father Benjamin Rush once stated "terrorism is a useful instrument to control the body through the medium of the mind." I hope I live to see the day when the Chinese military frees their children from George Washington since the American people are utterly brainwashed by their masters.
- Mary Elizabeth Schipke -

Good News/Bad News

The bad news is that Michael Jackson was arrested. The good news is that in the wake of Jackson's publicity coup, Strange Cosmos, a site full of wonderful nonsense, published my picture of my son wearing a T-Shirt Michael Jackson doesn't want you to see. The ball got rolling and my site got a miraculous 9,971 hits in one day. 
 
 

"Just because I massaged his penis with my mouth doesn't mean I molested him." 

- Michael Jackson -
 
This Week on Meria Heller's Show

November 24 John Buchanan returns with a HUGE announcement 
November 25 Michelle Kinnucan - Journalist - Patriot Act & Spying on America 
December 2 John Stanton, Author - Hitler's Ghost in the White House? 
December 4 Danny Schechter - Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception 
December 11 Albert Pastore - Stranger Than Fiction, True Culprits of 9/11 
December 16 Robert Greenwald - Uncovered: The Truth About The War in Iraq 
December 24 Catherine Austin Fitts - Where's the Money? Each show free for 24 hours!

Holiday from Hell

You've already spent all your money on Disinfotainment Today mugs so it'll be easy to celebrate Buy Nothing Day.

Shockwave of the Week

In this lovely piece of work, Dubya hangs himself with his own words.

Movie Dubya Doesn't Want You To See

John Pilger's amazing report on the War on Terror.

Movie Steve Jobs Doesn't Want You To See

The iPod's Dirty Little Secret is that the battery only lasts 18 months and it's irreplaceable.

Website Jenna Bush Doesn't Want You To See

 
Using his very own words, this site explains to Dubya why he should put his money where his mouth is and Draft Jenna Bush.
 
Website Dubya Should be Forced to See

The Iraq Body Count Visual Aid.

Don't Take My Word For It

     "September 11 could not have changed the course of history to the extent that it has if President Bush had not responded to it the way he did. He declared war on terrorism, and under that guise implemented a radical foreign-policy agenda whose underlying principles predated the tragedy. Those principles can be summed up as follows: International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails.
   "The supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. The supremacist ideology postulates that just because we are stronger than others, we know better and have right on our side. The very first sentence of the September 2002 National Security Strategy (the President's annual laying out to Congress of the country's security objectives) reads, 'The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.'
   "The assumptions behind this statement are false on two counts. First, there is no single sustainable model for national success. Second, the American model, which has indeed been successful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and we are not willing to yield it." 
- George Soros: The Bubble of American Supremacy -

"The primary role of the state police has become spying and suppression of legitimate attempts to challenge the undemocratic and secret rule of the national security state. The purpose of the law now is to put the protection of profits above people at all costs, even to the point of police destruction of the evidence necessary to reconstruct the crime."
- John Judge: Good Americans -

    "The UN refugee agency announced Tuesday that it was temporarily pulling 30 foreign staff members out of large areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan and closing refugee reception centers in four provinces. Analysts said the closures were a victory for resurgent Taliban forces and could affect thousands of refugees trying to return to Afghanistan from Pakistan. 

    "The suspension of operations comes after three attacks on UN offices and employees in the last week by suspected Taliban fighters. The shootings and bombings, which appear to be growing in sophistication and lethality, are believed to be part of a campaign to drive aid workers from southern Afghanistan, the Taliban heartland. The group appears to be trying to gain support from ethnic Pashtuns already frustrated by a lack of aid from the international community and a lack of power in the national government." 
 
"No matter how assiduously the daily industrial-strength tissue of lies is spun, denying the discernible deterioration of our sick civilization, and no matter how many have invested their lives in believing and sustaining these lies: unpleasant realities are lumbering inexorably toward us. Experts in all fields are dogtrotted out by the truckload, and dutifully trundled through the mills of mass media, in order continually to bury and re-bury any signs of incipient awareness in the populace that all is not well. Official repertoires consisting of studied stupidities, frank falsehoods, diagrams for dummies, simpering smirks and posturing pomposities are designed to semaphore to a somnambulant citizenry that everything is under control. In fact, mounting evidence points entirely to a contrary conclusion. And in the face of our stunningly complicated world problems, the toddler's cartoon version of life, offered by those in power through the mass media's obedient mouth, is one of the most shocking aspects of our predicament. Of a multitude of symptoms indicating rampant human lunacy presently operating on a grand scale, the continual insulting offerings of Frankenspeak in lieu of meaningful communication is perhaps the most directly alarming, disgusting and telling."
- Diane Harvey: Juggernaut Rising - Part One:  The Disintegration Of Dystopia -

    "They had envisioned an open-topped carriage ride down the mall to Buckingham Palace with Bush seated beside the Queen, both heads of state waving and smiling before throngs of admiring and grateful, patriotic spectators.    "There would be a spectacular state banquet at the palace and a review of the Queen's cavalry regiment. In essence, all the pomp and circumstance of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, 'Bush in London'.
    "But, it was not to be. American security demands for an impenetrable security bubble surrounding the president were little more than a thinly disguised plan to prevent the media circus traveling with Bush from witnessing the massive London protests that greeted the most hated man on the face of the planet."
- Michael Carmichael -

    "Violence and terrorism are no different. Like poverty, they will always be with us. At best they can only be diminished and contained. Yet now, with the arrogance of power, we have the Bush/Blair roadshow promising in sub-Churchillian tones to vanquish terrorism as though it were a clearly defined enemy like Nazi Germany.
    "Terrorism is a technique. It is not an ideology or a political philosophy, let alone an enemy state. Our leaders' failure to understand that point emerged immediately after September 11 2001 when they reacted to the attacks in New York and Washington by confusing the hunt for the perpetrators with the Afghan 'state' that allegedly 'harboured' them. The Taliban ran a vicious regime, but Afghanistan was a disastrously failed state and its nominal leader, Mullah Omar, had no control over al-Qaida.
    "By the same token the 'war' on terror should have remained what it initially was, a metaphor like the 'war' on drugs. But instead of being harmless linguistic exaggeration to describe a broad campaign encompassing a range of political, economic and police counter-measures, it was narrowed down to real war and nothing else. The slippery slope that began with Afghanistan quickly led to the invasion of Iraq, a symbolic and political enormity whose psychological impact Bush and Blair have not yet grasped."
- Jonathan Steele: A War That Can Never be Won -

     "There are two types of creators in the world. One type of creator works with objects - a poet, a painter, they work with objects, they create things. The other type of creator, the mystic, creates himself. He doesn't work with objects, he works with the subject; he works on himself, his own being. And he is the real creator, the real poet, because he makes himself into a masterpiece. 
    "You are carrying a masterpiece hidden within you, but you are standing in the way. Just move aside, then the masterpiece will be revealed. Everyone is a masterpiece, because God never gives birth to anything less than that. Everyone carries that masterpiece hidden for many lives, no knowing who they are and just trying on the surface to become someone. 
    "Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it. God himself has created you; you cannot be improved."

- Osho: Ah, This! Chapter 1 -

"You have to protect your writing time. The easiest thing to do on earth is not write."
- William Goldman -
 

    "Journalists often endanger themselves when they expose malfeasance by powerful people who belong to societal elites. These groups often have a powerful influence over those who control the media. Investigative reporters often find themselves abandoned when politically correct peers, worried about their jobs, avert their eyes in willful blindness and even vilify them publicly...
   "The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects investigative reporters against prior restraint and prohibitions on genre or content. It prevents those who find their writing disquieting from gagging them. The law determines that public officials and the judiciary, whose life and behavior result in public focus or interest, must remain accountable and not try to silence members of the press corps. Moreover, satire and cartoons define as protected speech under the First Amendment even if the target does not appreciate the humor...    "In most cases, the targets of satire initiate it by their own behavior and statements. Satirists patiently wait for tyrants to behave with avarice and to cover up their unlawful activity then expose their deeds. The satirist recognizes and accepts that the truth, by its very nature, often inflames the sensibilities of others. It especially inflames those people who identify with the negative aspects of exposure."
Everything Else

Mandatory reading: The president, speaking after attacks on police stations and a Red Cross facility in Iraq killed at least 35 people, said such attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said. Chris Floyd takes this logic and applies it to various historical situations in the brilliant Global Eye - Logical Conclusions. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," said U.S. General George Custer, in a battlefield interview during a brief lull in what he termed "a light skirmish" with Indian forces at Little Big Horn. 

Go here and you can figure out exactly how much money (in pounds) you'd have saved if you'd never had a drink, how many bathtubs full of booze you've consumed, and how many Ferraris you could have bought.

Your left brain and your right brain struggle for control over your mouse in this color test.

Just once, before you die, you must visit the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and The Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane.

There's so much good stuff here I don't even know where to start. Just go to The Open Society Institute and start clicking.

All you fans of Master and Commander better get a look at National Lampoon's The Rigging of a Ship by Henry Beard.

Artisan foods are handmade foods made by small manufacturers, often families, who avoid the trappings of BIG food and only sell by mail order. They make orgasmic Christmas gifts. Fuck Atkins. Get yourself some artisan cheese and some homemade fudge.
 

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Acknowledgment

dIsInFoTaInMeNt ToDaY is free and may be reproduced in any form. It consists of information from dozens of sources, cut up, thrown in the air, and recycled randomly. It is sent all over the place, so I apologize if you're seeing the same thing twice. If you see a joke, graphic, or news item that came from or through you, thanks, send more, and please accept the fact that much of dIsInFoTaInMeNt ToDaY is unacknowledgeable, and if I sought permission from everyone whose bastardized material showed up here, I'd never get anything else done. Please note that I don't even put my own name on it. If you're still pissed off, hey, it's fair use.
 

Thanks,

Satan


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