an obvious life hack: how to make streaming more affordable and still enjoy ad-free viewing

Much ink is being spilled, metaphorically speaking, about the changing trends in subscription-based streaming services. Headlines scream that shows on Netflix and Prime will now include ads, implying that users will pay the same rates plus see ads, as we did with cable TV. 

But that's not true (at least not yet). So far, most streaming services have started offering a tiered system, with a less expensive, ad-supported level, and a more expensive level without ads.

For Netflix, the difference is substantial: $5.99 vs. either $16.49 or $20.99 for the two ad-free options. Disney also has three tiers: $7.99 with ads, $11.99 or $14.99 without. Amazon's deal is worse: in order to avoid an upcoming price increase for Prime Video, you'll need to pay an additional three dollars a month. (These are Canadian prices only, of course.)

No ads. Ever.

No one likes price increases, and I'm no exception. But for me, ads are a deal-breaker. I'd go back to watching on DVD before I'd subject myself to advertising during shows. No question.

The only time we see ads are on YouTube. We've opted not to subscribe to YouTube Premium -- me, because I don't use it often, and Allan, because he's more motivated to keep expenses down. (The apps that block ads on YouTube can't be used on our streaming devices.) But I don't watch full movies or series on YouTube, so it's not a big deal.

Up until now, I've enjoyed the convenience of subscribing to multiple platforms at the same time. With the price increases, the convenience feels more like a luxury. 

Streaming on rotation

So I'm using a simple solution: rotate monthly subscriptions according to what we want to watch. 

As my thrifty partner points out, you can only watch one show/series/movie at a time. (Even if you follow several series at a time, your eyeballs are only one at any given moment.) So when you're watching something on one platform, you're still paying for all the other service that you're not currently watching. 

Like most people, I find the movies and series I want to watch scattered across different platforms, and there's a limited number of shows that interest me from any one service. Take AppleTV+ as an example. When we first got Apple's streaming service, I thought it was amazing -- so many great shows! Then we saw five or six really good shows*, a few others...  and that was it. There was nothing else we were interested in.

So why not rotate?

Subscribe to Netflix to watch specific titles, then after you've seen what you're there for, find something that appeals on a different service, subscribe to that one, and cancel Netflix. Keep an eye on what other services are offering, cancel and subscribe, mix and match. 

It will take a bit more planning, for sure. I'll put reminders on my calendars for the monthly renewals. That's not a big deal, plus if I miss one, it's not a disaster. (I acknowledge this is challenging for some people. I have many challenges, but staying organized is not one of them.) 

Current streaming lineup

Right now, I'm subscribing to Disney and Crave on annual plans. I fell for what appeared to be a better value, imagining I would want to continue indefinitely. When those annual subscriptions run out, I'll put those on rotation, too. 

I'll continue to subscribe to Prime, to get free shipping on Amazon.

I want to get Paramount, to finish "Yellowstone," then watch the two Yellowstone prequels; I've been waiting for the second half of Yellowstone S5 to drop. Now I'll also wait for a good break from some other service, cancelling something before I get Paramount. 

There is one Canada-only snag: when licensing runs out, shows disappear. With this mix-and-match approach, I may miss something I wanted to see. But that's what downloads are for.

Many people will choose lower prices over ad-free, because paying less or "saving" money is more important than not seeing advertising. And for some people, Netflix may suddenly become affordable. But I can't imagine that many people will go back to cable -- expensive, tons of ads, limited viewing options, scheduled (as opposed to on-demand), and for the most part, crappy shows.

------

* Best: Bad Sisters, Shining Girls, Slow Horses, The Morning Show (S1 and S2 only). 

Very good: Severance. 

Good: Ted Lasso (S1 only, emphatically!), Truth Be Told (S1-S2), For All Mankind (S1-S2), Shrinking.

five reasons streaming is still better than cable, even if the price tag is the same (plus a long story mostly for myself)

If you stream movies and TV series, you know that the proliferation of streaming channels has had mixed results for consumers.

Many shows that were formerly on Netflix have been pulled by their media parents, and are now found on different streaming apps. At the same time, Netflix's monthly price has increased -- so you're paying more for less.

Those who still want access to the shows no longer on Netflix need to subscribe to an additional streaming service; Disney (which has all the Marvel properties) and Britbox are two big culprits.

Two other very popular streaming services, Crave (owned by Bell Media) and Prime (owned by Amazon), have exclusive rights to many enticing shows, including all the HBO and Showtime series. Recently Bell Media made an annoying cash-grab by offering a first season of a given show on Crave, then requiring an additional subscription to Movies+HBO or Starz to watch the rest.

Many people have observed that if you want a few of these services, the price tag will rival the cost of cable.

I recently decided to subscribe to whatever streaming apps I want. Previously I was holding it to Netflix and Crave. But we spend next to nothing on entertainment now, and watching movies and series is a principal form of relaxation for me. I'm fortunate that I can afford it now.

So I added a bunch of channels/apps/services/whatever (what are we calling these now?), and the combined price does rival our former cable bill.

However, I still find streaming far superior to cable. Here's why.

1. NO ADS. Paying for TV and still having every show stuffed with commercials is an indignity and should be considered theft. The paid streaming services are ad-free.

2. Streaming lets you purchase only the channels you want. Pay for what you use, don't pay for what you never use. When we had cable, I found 95% of it completely useless.

3. The low monthly prices for most streaming services give you flexibility. You can get an app for a month or two to watch a specific show, then easily unsubscribe.

4. Which leads to the next reason: there are no installation fees or other rip-off costs.

5. Which leads to reason #5: you don't have to deal with telcos at all. All you need is internet.

In conclusion, streaming > cable.


* * * *

I was looking back through some of my early posts about cable, access to baseball, Netflix, Roku, and etc. I had forgotten about some of the twists and turns I went through. I want to document it all here. Totally boring stuff, but I want to have it in one place.

1. In New York, we subscribed to Netflix, back when it was only a DVD-by-mail service. Netflix was a huge game-changer for us, as renting quality movies in our neighbourhood was always problematic. We subscribed to Netflix for DVDs for several years.

2. When we emigrated to Canada, I knew there was no Netflix (at the time), but I heard there was a Netflix-type service called Zip.ca.

3. I subscribed to Zip, but there were issues. One, they sent you movies in random order. Netflix didn't guarantee you would receive movies in the exact order of your queue, but you got something close to it. Since we don't watch blockbuster movies, we almost always received our top three choices. With Zip, it was totally random. The next baseball season would roll around, and I hadn't seen my priority movies. I did find a workaround, but it was limited.

4. At the same time, we were spending a lot of money to see our out-of-town team's baseball games. We had to subscribe to cable at a high level, then add the MLB package, plus we subscribed to MLB online, so Allan could watch games while at work (which was at least half the games for the week, sometimes more). But we couldn't watch MLB only online, because Rogers capped our internet usage!

5. In 2006 I lost my job and was unemployed or very under-employed for many years. Spending less was a priority, one that we often failed to achieve.

6. In 2010, Netflix came to Canada as a streaming-only service. There wasn't much on it.

7. In 2011, my workaround with Zip -- which depended on a willing and creative customer service person -- ended. (Soon after that, Zip was purchased by Rogers and became a standard pay-per-view service.) I subscribed to a different DVD-by-mail service, called Cinemail. It sucked and I quickly cancelled it.

8. In 2012, two extraordinary things happened at that same time: my friend M@ told me about Teksavvy, and I learned we could watch MLB through a Roku streaming device. Minds were blown, worlds were rocked.

I'll let an old post tell this part of the story.

In February, I asked for help with my movie-season problem. We had been getting special treatment from Zip, but once that ended, Zip became useless again. I knew there had to be a better way. It's the 21st Century, for crissakes. Why can't we get on-demand baseball, movies, and whatever else we want to watch? First world problems? Absolutely! But that's where I live.

In the past, no suggestions really worked for us. We couldn't get rid of cable TV, because we needed it to watch baseball. We couldn't watch baseball online, because we had a cap on our bandwidth usage. (And because of our work schedules, we had to subscribe to baseball through cable and internet!) I didn't want to watch movies via Netflix only on computer. I didn't want to buy a gaming system just to watch movies. Nothing was quite right.

And then, everything came together.

M@ started it all by identifying the root of the problem: the first step was to get rid of Rogers and their ridiculous bandwidth cap. Switching to TekSavvy was fast and easy. We save money, we get more, and suddenly... we have choices.

Next, we bought two Roku devices, one for each TV. Allan drove to Buffalo to make sure we were set up for the baseball season, but they may now be shipping to Canada.

Next, Roku began to support Netflix Canada.

And next, Netflix Canada has hugely improved since I first checked it out. It has even improved in the last two weeks, growing by leaps and bounds.

I thought that getting rid of cable would be slightly inconvenient, but I'd adjust. That's because I didn't know what awaited me through streaming, via Roku.

Baseball without commercials! (At least the ones between innings.)

Movies! And lots of them. No more waiting to see what we receive in the mail - but without having to watch on a computer, or having to hook up a computer to the TV.

And not just movies. The small amount of TV I care about is suddenly now available on demand. Without commercials. . . . .

From the earliest days of Netflix DVDs-by-mail and cable Pay-Per-View, I used to wonder when we'd be able to watch any movie or any TV show, anytime we wanted, in our own homes. I just moved one giant step closer to that.

9. We learned how to create a wireless VPN, so we would have two IP addresses, one in Canada and one in the US, so we were able to access both versions of Netflix, plus baseball without blackouts.

10. In 2016, Netflix cracked down on VPNs. You could still watch US Netflix on a computer, but I could no longer get it wirelessly through Roku. (VPN providers still claim that you can, but really... no.) Fortunately by this time, Netflix Canada had improved significantly.

11. Also in 2016, Amazon's streaming service, then called Amazon Instant Video, finally was available in Canada.

12. In 2018, we purchased an AppleTV, which has exclusive rights to Crave -- which has all the HBO and Showtime shows. Turns out it gives much better access to MLB than Roku. Nice!

13. In 2019, I gave myself permission to add any streaming service I want, to have maximum options. I am pretty happy about this.

14. One last bit. I am dreaming of an app that would let viewers track their watchlists across different services. Not a media server, because I won't have the shows downloaded. And not quite one of these, as they are all limited in different ways. I want a master watchlist that can click through to the show on the appropriate streaming service.

what i'm reading: the instant pot bible

I've never reviewed a cookbook before, but then I've never been this enthusiastic about a cookbook before: The Instant Pot Bible by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough.

Why I love this book

Before I bury the lede with a lot of explanation, I'll tell you why I find The Instant Pot Bible so appealing.

-- The design. When you're using a book for information, design and layout are very important. Someone (or someones) really nailed it with this one. I find it incredibly clear and easy to use.

-- The formatting. Ingredient list on the left, step-by-step instructions, IP times and settings highlighted in a chart. And so on. Not only a great format, but more consistent than many other cookbooks I've used.

-- One specific bit of formatting that I find super useful is a gray box called "Beyond". Here, the authors put all the substitutions, extras, and equivalences. I appreciate not having to sort through those to read a basic recipe.

-- Road maps! The Instant Pot Bible includes many mix-and-match, create-your-own recipe strategies that the authors call "road maps". Here's an example.
 

This is the first page of a two-page recipe.

If you don't want to use these road maps, they're easy enough to avoid. But for me, using a road map means I'm not only following recipes step by step, I'm learning more about cooking.

-- A huge variety of recipes, using a wide range of ingredients and for all different palates -- and using the IP all different ways. 

-- Useful tags, such as "fast and easy," "can be gluten-free," "vegetarian," "can be vegan," "fewer than 10 ingredients," "freezes well," and so on. Using tags to do this, rather than organizing the book according to these categories was very smart.

-- Really good writing! I love the authors' writing style. It's personable, warm, and down-to-earth. They want cooking to be fun and easy -- and they want to gently help you move out of your comfort zone.

-- Everything is explained. I like a cookbook that doesn't assume you already know how to do everything. Equal access for all levels of cooking experience!

The back story

I was a little late to the Instant Pot craze, which turned out to be a good thing, as the newer models are easier to use and safer. I bought my "Instapot" (as I like to call it) about six months ago. I chose the 8-quart Ultra model. I gave away my beloved slow cooker, and have been using the IP for all my batch cooking -- which is almost all the cooking I do.

Until recently, when I needed to know how to make something in the IP, I would just google "Instant Pot Chicken Noodle Soup," "Instant Pot Beef Stew," or what have you. For variety, I would google "Healthy Instant Pot Meals" or the like.

For the most part, the links that turned up were fake cooking sites. These sites feature recipes copied from anywhere else (often from the Instant Pot site itself), with useless verbiage added for the purpose of forcing readers to click and scroll. They are stuffed with ads, often video ads, that cannot be blocked. I would try to swoop in, get the information I needed, and swoop out. But after a while, the ads, the sameness of the recipes, and the fake-blog writing really started annoying me.

I borrowed a few IP cookbooks from the library, but I most of them had very few recipes for anything I wanted to cook or eat. Then a library customer told me about the Instant Pot Bible.

And not just any customer: Babs, the woman who runs the produce truck that serves the North Island communities during the summer and early autumn. The truck comes into town once or twice a week, rotating through the communities, with high-quality fruits and vegetables that put the supermarket produce to shame.

Babs is a lovely person, a great salesperson, and from what I gather, an accomplished cook. I gave her nonfiction audiobooks all summer, to listen to on her long drives between towns. She told me these audiobooks have changed her life -- the highest praise I can get as a librarian.

When she enthusiastically recommended this book, I gave her word a lot of cred. And now I'm passing along the joy.

mlb rule changes: more disregard and contempt for baseball's core fans

I stopped following this baseball season a while back. The 2019 Red Sox are not very good, and I'm perfectly happy to enjoy my first summer on beautiful Vancouver Island without them.

But it's not just the lackluster Red Sox that are keeping me away.

I'm disgusted and deeply saddened by the rule changes that MLB instituted in 2017, and even more by those coming in the 2020 season. These changes damage the very foundation of the sport. And, worst of all, they are completely unnecessary.

Baseball America says the changes will "fundamentally alter the way teams construct their rosters, as well as change the roles players may be groomed for in player development". (I've listed most of the changes below, excluding how players are compensated for the All Star Game.)

Games are too long! Games are too long! (If we keep repeating it, we will make it so!)

Supposedly baseball games are too long. Supposedly baseball games are too slow. "Young people" aren't interested in baseball.

We hear these claims repeated -- ad nauseam. We've also heard that Barack Obama is a socialist, Canadians are governed by death panels, and no one reads anymore. (For the record: false, false, false.) Just because every baseball announcer gripes about games being too long, and the "too long" mantra has become accepted wisdom, doesn't make it true.

But whether or not these claims are true, changing the rules to limit and constrain strategy could never be the correct response.

Finding ways to quicken the pace of games isn't a bad thing, as long as it doesn't mess with the basics of the sport. But if the goal of these changes is to bring in younger fans, it's a useless response that is guaranteed to fail.

MLB flails around trying to appeal to some mythical demographic, imagining if they jump higher or spin faster, they can drive Millennials to baseball -- a project that can only fail. In the process, MLB alienates the people who most love and support the game.

Length of games and pace of games are two different things, of course. No one like when a reliever comes in and what should be an exciting game grinds to a tedious crawl. Make the pitchers pitch, make the batters step in, within a certain amount of time. That will help pick up the pace without altering the fundamentals of the sport.

But games are too long? Watch a different sport.

Baseball games are as long as they need to be. They are played until one team wins. Don't like that? Prefer a game that is played against a clock? There are plenty to choose from.

Games are too long? The most obvious solution stares us in the face after the third out of every inning: show fewer ads! But of course that can't happen. MLB is shaving off a bit of time between innings -- but that doesn't mean fewer ads. It means more onscreen ads during play. Ads during at-bats, and ads on two-thirds of your screen, with the game reduced to a small box. This is unconscionable.

Of course games were shorter in the mythical Good Old Days. But -- this should be obvious, but isn't -- we can only compare like with like. There are more commercial breaks, and the breaks are longer now. So we're comparing apples and grapefruits. This is reminiscent of that 21st Century stat "hits in the post-season". Wow, Derek Jeter has more postseason hits than Babe Ruth! Jeter must be the greatest player ever! (PS: Jeter played in an era with three levels of postseason play. Ruth's era had only the World Series.) (But don't let facts get in the way of your sycophancy.)

The automatic intentional walk. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

We're already living with one useless and destructive change that supposedly speeds up the game: the automatic intentional walk. Did those four pitched balls really take up so much time? Does MLB really think this will make a difference to Millennials who don't watch baseball? "You know, I used to find baseball really slow and boring, but now that fans don't have to suffer through four pitches during an intentional walk, I think I'll drop $50 on a ticket!"

Or maybe it's "I didn't grow up watching baseball and no one I know talks about it or cares about it, but man, that automatic intentional walk rule, that's the shit! I can't find a decent job that will let me move out of my parents' home, so I'll buy a streaming package that lets me watch every game! Whoo-hoo!

What really happens when the ump raises four fingers and the pitcher doesn't throw those four pitches? Fans -- actual fans, who already watch the game -- are denied an opportunity. Because while the pitcher is throwing those four balls, something might happen. Sometimes it does. Grant Brisbee calls it "the Church of Youneverknow".

But there's one thing that everyone shares, from the traditionalists to the nerds to the casual fans, and it goes something like this: Baseball is fascinated with the idea of the hyper-rare, the 1-in-1,000, the 1-in-10,000, the 1-in-a-million. It's why the purists insist that you watch every awful at-bat from every pitcher, just to feel rewarded when one of them gets a hit. It's why there are still people who know the name Bill Wambsganss. It's why we remember the squirrels on the field, the mitts thrown to first with baseballs in them, and the hitters who swing at a pitchout to protect a hit-and-run.

It's why baseball fans will take up arms if you try to take the freaks and the flukes away from them. Call it the Church of Youneverknow, and it holds that nothing is more sacred in baseball than the slightest possibility of a fluke occurrence. And this faction is currently angry because the rules of baseball are changing, and intentional walks are going away.

All the impending rule changes do this. Minimum number of batters a pitcher can face, limits on the number of mound visits, the active roster changes, minimum days on the injury list -- they all reduce strategic options. Paul Muschick calls it "legislating the strategy of the game," an apt description. Less strategy equals less interest.

I couldn't care less about the useless relic called the All-Star Game, but beginning an inning with a runner on second base is a ridiculous and truly horrible idea. This If the ASG is used as a wedge to bring this ridiculous rule into major-league play, the game will be in serious trouble -- trouble caused by MLB itself. [A commenter reminded me that this is already happening in the minor leagues -- another sign this is coming to the major leagues.]

MLB disrespects fans every day

These rule changes are more examples of MLB's contempt for its most loyal fans. That contempt begins with broadcasts. We're all so used to it now that we may have forgotten: games used to be shown for free on regular TV. Local fans could just turn on their TVs and watch the game. Forcing people to subscribe to expensive cable TV packages and then blacking out the games in the local market are the true measure of baseball's concern for real fans. Everything is organized for telco and MLB profit, without a thought for fan access.

We see baseball's disregard for fans in ways large and small.

Games shown only on Facebook. (And what a surprise, the tech doesn't work properly.)

Allowing ads to be shown during play.

Allowing ads to be shown during at-bats!

Resale contracts that squeeze regular fans for top-dollar prices.

At the ballpark, blasting music between innings so fans can't talk to each other without shouting.

The impending rule-changes are part of this same pattern. They are are all about marketing. MLB has turned our sport into a focus group.

What's really ruining the sport?

I'm so tired of all the hand-wringing about baseball. Remember the season we were supposed to care that African American youth weren't playing the game? Before that, there were too many home runs. (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, while MLB tolerates steroid use because it brings in fans dollars... then blames the players' union.) Now we're supposed to care that there are too many strikeouts! I can scarcely think of something stupider to complain about. And of course, games are too slow, games are too long.

Meanwhile, the things that are ruining the experience of watching baseball -- the endless parade of corporate logos, every moment of the game being sponsored, ads during at-bats, split-screen ads, ads blasting in between innings at the ballpark -- are allowed to expand, because... you know why. It's the same reason MLB turned a blind eye to steroid use for so long. There is something ruining our beautiful sport, but it's not the length of games. Don't make me say The C Word.

We're Number Three! We're Number Three!

Once upon a time in North America, there were three professional sports that commanded national attention: baseball, horse racing (then simply called "racing" because that's the only kind there was), and boxing. Now two of those sports are marginal, and two different sports occupy the top spots.

If baseball ranks third in popularity, after football and basketball, why should fans care? How does it hurt us?

It doesn't.

The only people who should care if baseball has a smaller audience than football and basketball are the billionaires who pay the millionaires. If baseball is less popular, and the owners make less money, and player salaries decrease...? You'll have to explain to me why fans should care about this. Most fans would consider it an improvement.

Baseball is not for everybody. No sport is. No anything is.

Slightly shorter and faster-paced games are not going to affect a major cultural shift. Rule changes are not going to turn generations of young people into baseball fans.

Those who don't care about baseball will continue not to care.

Those who do will either grit their teeth and bear it, or give up.

In my lifetime (now approaching the 60-year mark), the only significant change in the rules of the game has been the designated hitter rule, which began in 1973. I have vague memories of people arguing about the DH, but I didn't grow up in a sports-watching household, and by the time I got into baseball on my own, the DH was all I knew.

Millions of baseball fans have come of age watching the game with a designated hitter. Maybe one day beginning the 10th inning with a runner standing on second base will seem normal. I won't know, because I won't be watching anymore.

* * * * *

Some of the changes insituted in 2017

- The no-pitch intentional walk

- Managers must decide whether or not to challenge (and invoke review) within 30 seconds

- One less inning for Crew Chiefs to invoke replay review, when managers have used all their challenges.

Changes instituted in 2019

- Single trade deadline that is final

- Inning breaks reduced by five seconds in local games and 25 seconds in national games.

- Reduction in number of allowable mound visits

-  If an All Star Game goes into extra innings, those innings will begin with a runner standing on second base.

Some of the changes that will be implemented in 2020

- Active roster limit will increase

- 40-man September roster will be eliminated

- Number of pitchers on active roster capped

- Position players may not pitch (with exceptions)

- Pitchers will face a minimum number of batters -- essentially the end of the LOOGY.

- Minimum number of days on the injury list increased from 10 to 15

the mysterious case of kars4kids: deceptive advertising for orthodox jewish proselytizing

When I watch baseball, I always watch the Red Sox broadcast, and almost always choose local radio for the audio feed. (Hooray for MLB streaming on Roku!) And while I always mute the ads between innings, hundreds of ads are stuffed into the broadcast itself, so it's impossible not to hear and see a lot of advertising.

One advertising staple is something called "Cars for Kids". The ad exhorts you to make a cash donation or to donate your used car, and tells you how Cars for Kids makes it very simple. I've been hearing this for years, but only recently wondered, what is Cars for Kids? Who are the kids, and how are cars helping them?

I assumed it had something to do with fundraising for children with a serious illness. The Red Sox are linked to an organization called The Jimmy Fund, which supports the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is also a Red Sox sponsor. So I assumed that Cars for Kids was something similar.

Wrong!

First, I discovered Cars for Kids is actually "Kars 4 Kids," which is stupid and pointless. Since the misspelling is pronounced the same way as the proper spelling, why misspell?

Next, I discovered that when you visit the Kars 4 Kids website, it's not immediately apparent what the vehicle donations actually support. The FAQs are all about how to donate your car. The donor comments are about how easy it was to donate a car. The "How It Works" link, same.

Those links are in all-caps, bold, right up front when you first go to the site.

In a smaller font, not all-caps, not bold, on the left, there are links to "charity" and "about us". Click on one of those, and for the first time, you see the word Jewish on the site.

The website for Kars 4 Kids Canada (I guess they realized Kanada would be a mistake), shows this.

Both websites (and all the Kars 4 Kids websites) keep the purpose of the charity pretty vague. They help "children develop into productive members of the community", they "keep kids busy in a healthy environment", they "give Jewish children and their families the support, resources and guidance they need". What does that mean?

All the Kars 4 Kids websites mention something called Oorah. In the US: "our sister charity, Oorah", with no further explanation. The Canadian site says "Your car donation will benefit Kars4Kids, d/b/a Oorah Charitable Organization, a registered charity dedicated to addressing the educational, emotional and spiritual needs of Jewish children and their families."

Having been raised Jewish, when I see those words -- the educational, emotional, and spiritual needs of Jewsih children -- I know exactly what it means. I have the code book.

Next stop, Oorah. Oorah appears to sponsor programs exclusively for Jewish people to explore Judaism. This is code for trying to get Jews to become Orthodox.

People who practice Judaism generally fall on a continuum from Reform, to Conservative, to Orthodox; these are called movements. (They are sometimes known as sects, but they're really not equivalent to, for example, the Protestant sects.) In addition to the three movements, there are sub-divisions, such as Reconstructionist, Modern Orthodox, and several others. This is a huge, complex political and cultural stew, full of hypocrisy and arrogance, full of people looking down on other people for choosing or taking paths different than their own. To someone like me who was raised in a Reform but observant household, the words "make their Judaic heritage more personal, relevant and meaningful" are heavily loaded.

More importantly, why would the general, non-Jewish public donate to this charity? I'm not sure why anyone, Jewish or not, would care about making "Judaic heritage more meaningful to Jewish children", but surely non-Jewish people wouldn't care about this, would they?

The absence of information -- who are the "kids"? how are the cars helping them? -- is obviously not accidental. Ad copy isn't found in nature, it's purposely and carefully written. And once I discovered Kars 4 Kids' mission and purpose, the omission of the word "Jewish" in ad copy seems purposely misleading -- deceptive.

I'm not the only person who thinks so.

From Tablet, a online magazine of "Jewish news, ideas, and culture": Kars 4 Kids Rakes In The Buckz: "A well-branded Jewish charity goes to great pains to avoid calling itself Jewish—and takes in millions nationwide."

From CharityWatch: Costly and Continuous Continuous Kars4Kids Disguise Charity's Real Purpose. (Clever use of alliteration!) From this story I learned that Kars 4 Kids advertises everywhere, especially on sports TV and radio, and apparently has an incredibly annoying jingle. CharityWatch writes:

Cars for… an Orthodox Jewish Cause

Nowhere in the Kars4Kids ads (in most states) does the charity inform potential donors of how their car donations will help kids. A visit to the "kars4kids.org/howtohelp" website displayed at the end of the TV commercial is similarly vague as to how kids will benefit, simply encouraging people to "take action" for the "1.2 million kids [that] leave school without a diploma each year" by volunteering to "mentor, fundraise, advocate or run an awareness campaign." (This "take action" message likely is a strategic one designed for Kars4Kids to take advantage of an accounting rule that allows charities to report a portion of advertising costs as program instead of fundraising expenses.) When going to the website address shown in the TV commercial, only by scrolling all the way down to the fine print that includes Kars4Kids' copyright notation at the bottom of the page will donors eventually learn what activities their donated cars support: [emphasis mine]"Your donation will benefit Kars4Kids, a national organization dedicated to addressing the educational, material, emotional and spiritual needs of Jewish children and their families [emphasis from CharityWatch]."

In CharityWatch's view, the Kars4Kids ads deceive potential donors by failing to inform them that donated cars will benefit a Jewish organization and kids of Jewish faith. Furthermore, the youth programs Kars4Kids supports promote an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, which CharityWatch believes compounds the deception perpetrated by the Kars4Kids ads. Oorah, Kars4Kids' "sister charity," is the organization that actually runs the "educational, developmental, and recreational programs for Jewish youth and their families" described in Kars4Kids' mission statement. Kars4Kids and Oorah share a principal officer, Eliyohu Mintz, the son of their founder, Rabbi Chaim Mintz, and both organizations are located at the same address in the heavily-Orthodox Jewish town of Lakewood, New Jersey. Oorah, which means "awaken" in Hebrew, "specializes in outreach to non-observant Jews, operating summer camps and other programs that seek to make non-Orthodox Jews more observant," according to an October 2016 article in the Forward, which covers news for a Jewish-American audience.

CharityWatch continues:

While supporting Orthodox Jewish organizations is a worthy endeavor for those donors who are intending to do so, many donors of other faiths may not be pleased to learn that the car they donated to Kars4Kids may have funded religious teachings that are in conflict with their own faith or personal beliefs. Orthodox Jews, who follow the traditional interpretations of Jewish law with strict observance of Jewish ritual, make up only about 10% of Jewish adults in the U.S., according to a 2013 survey published by the Pew Research Center in August 2015. Moreover, many secular Jews are not enthusiastic about funding Orthodox organizations...

If the truth about Kars4Kids' mission as a Jewish organization and its funding of Oorah's Orthodox Jewish outreach is an unwelcome surprise to some donors, perhaps they will be comforted to learn that since 2010, Kars4Kids also has conducted various charity events and giveaways for the benefit of needy children, regardless of their religious affiliation. These events have included several backpack giveaways and coat distributions in parts of New Jersey and New York. Kars4Kids also released a free smartphone app in mid-2014 designed as a safety alert for parents to remind them not to leave young children in the backseat of hot cars. Nonetheless, Kars4Kids' grants to Oorah still represented more than 91% of its program spending over the two-year period from 2014-2015, thereby making Jewish children the primary "kids" that benefit from its car donation proceeds – a fact that many Kars4Kids donors likely never end up knowing.

I also found stories, showing that less than one percent of funds raised even goes to the "kids". Oorah is also the subject of a million-dollar lawsuit, accused of using a synagogue to hide questionable financial dealings and putting the synagogue on the hook for a million bucks.*

Even more troubling than Kars 4 Kids deceptive practices are their unwitting donors. Do people really donate to organizations without knowing what they support? Never mind researching what percentage of donations goes to the actual cause -- start with the basics! What is the cause? Where does your money go?

According to everything I'm seeing online, millions of people -- which by definition means millions of non-Jewish people -- are forking over their hard-earned money to support Orthodox Jewish indoctrination education? Seriously?

Are tax deductions from car donations so amazing that donors don't care where the money goes, so long as they get their deduction? From CharityWatch: Car Donations: Taking Taxpayers for a Ride, and from Nonprofit Quarterly: Nation's Largest Car Donation Charity a Self-Dealing Mess.

* Since someone will undoubtedly point this out in comments, Bill O'Reilly "exposed" Kars4Kids on Fox News. I don't even want to click. I'll just call O'Reilly a stopped clock and move on.

what i'm reading: the attention merchants by tim wu

Everywhere we look, every available space is filled with advertising. The Toronto skyline is a sea corporate logos. The due-date receipt from my library book features an ad on the back. I once tracked all the ads shown during a major league baseball game -- during play, not between innings -- and the results were startling, even to me. And, of course, our entire experience on the internet -- especially on our personal mobile devices -- is tracked and used by corporations with only our dimmest awareness and nominal consent.

It wasn't always like this. How did we arrive at this current state? The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu answers this question. The answer is fascinating and entertaining, and -- if you dislike the constant and ever-increasing commodification of our lives, as I do -- more than a little frustrating.

In the first part of the book, Wu presents a capsule history of the "attention capture industry" -- what this review in The New York Times adeptly calls "the slow, steady annexation and exploitation of our consciousness". This begins with the first ads to appear in a daily newspaper, moves through snake-oil salesmen, to the first people to recognize the power of radio to sell products, through sponsored television shows, to ads during shows -- which was shocking and provoked outcry in its day! This section is truly fascinating. Wu is a master at finding sparkling details that make the story come alive. For example, I learned that snake oil, now a generic term for worthless products touted as cures for all ills, takes its name from a product that actually involved snakes. The Attention Merchants is packed with these kinds of tasty nuggets of information.

In the history of attention capture, Wu also includes government propaganda. He looks at how during the first World War, the British government, joined later by its American counterpart, used mass-media lies to entice young men to all but certain death in the trenches. This segment also analyzes the first modern total information campaign, and the first to harness electronic media for large-scale propaganda, that of one Adolph Hitler. We've all seen footage of the giant Nazi rallies with huge fascist insignias, but I didn't fully realize that Hitler, along with Third Reich propaganda master Joseph Goebbels, was the first to study and analyze attention capture, and to use it on a grand scale. (Incidentally, if you know anyone who believes the 'Hitler was all right at first, he just went too far' canard, Wu provides ammunition to shoot it down. From his earliest days making speeches in beer halls, Hitler was blaming Germany's woes on Jews.)

Another interesting segment is devoted to what Wu calls "The Celebrity-Industrial Complex". For someone like me who doesn't share the mainstream obsession with celebrity -- indeed, I don't understand it, even a little -- this was both fascinating and affirming. Wu offers an interesting analysis of Oprah Winfrey's attention methods, which he sees as groundbreaking in a not altogether positive way.

The part of The Attention Merchants that has been the focus of most reviews and interviews is about the price we pay for supposedly free services on the internet. Most of us have heard the phrase, "when a service is free, we're not customers, we're the product" or variations thereof. (Various people have made this public statement at various times, dating back to Richard Serra in 1973.) Wu dissects exactly what that means -- for the tremendous potential of the internet, now tremendously debased and squandered, and for ourselves, with our fractured attention spans, short and ever shorter.

In the book's later chapters, the tone and tenor changes from dispassionate historical analysis to passionate and savaging. The rise of "free" social media, where billions of people willingly submit to having their personal habits mined, tracked, and resold for other people's profits, on a scale never before seen in human history, is not a mixed blessing in Wu's worldview. It's a flat-out evil.

By the time I finished the book, I challenged myself to take a holiday from social media and reclaim my own attention span. Some of you know that because of my health issues, I struggle with low concentration. Perhaps the effects are exaggerated for me... or perhaps not. I want to spend less time with little bits of information scrolling in front of my eyes. When it comes to information, I want quality over quantity. I'm experimenting with it now, but I'm not sure I'll ever go back.

Wu also points out a massive public pushback, as evidenced by the millions of people willing to pay a monthly fee to enjoy advertising-free viewing through Netflix, HBO, Showtime, and similar services. The cultural phenomenon known as binge-watching is evidence that we can focus our attention for lengthy periods of time, when what we're watching is good enough to warrant it.

Wu writes:

Ultimately, the problem was as old as the original proposition of seizing our attention and putting it to uses not our own. It is a scheme that has been revised and renewed with every new technology, which always gains admittance into our lives under the expectation it will improve them -- and improve them it does, until it acquires motivations of its own, which can only grow and grow. As Oxford ethicist James Williams puts it, "Your goals are things like 'spend more time with the kids,' 'learn to play the zither,' 'lose twenty pounds by summer,' 'finish my degree,' etc. Your time is scarce, and you know it. Your technologies, on the other hand, are trying to maximize goals like 'Time on Site,' 'Number of Video Views,' 'Number of Pageviews,' and so on. Hence clickbait, hence auto-playing videos, hence avalanches of notifications. Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it."

Wu references William James,

"who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one's life is lived. That, if nothing else, ought to compel a greater scrutiny of the countless bargains to which we routinely submit, and even more important, lead us to consider the necessity, at times, of not dealing at all.

I've added Wu's first book, The Master Switch, to my to-read list.

fun with bag signs: in which i am photographed removing garbage from my neighbourhood

Are there bag signs where you live?

In Mississauga and perhaps most suburban places, people put up bag signs advertising services. The signs are cheap to buy and easy to post. They are also illegal. To me, they are the Nexus of Evil: advertising plus visual pollution plus polyethylene waste.

I have called 311 to complain about these signs in my neighbourhood, and if the City has someone available, they will sometimes dispatch a crew to remove the signs. Presumably this crew is also doing other outdoor maintenance, or perhaps they are driving around removing bag signs, which would be awesome.

Allan and I also remove these signs ourselves. When we lived in a house, we would throw the signs in the garage until enough had collected, then bundle up the vinyl for trash and the metal frames for recycling. Now, while we're out with our dogs, we'll just put the whole thing in a public trash barrel.

This morning while I was out with Diego, I slipped the vinyl off a bag sign, crumbled it up, and threw it in the trash. As I turned the corner, I noticed a car parked across the street, the driver removing something from the trunk. Then he walked towards me, carrying a sign.

Diego and I watched as he pushed the metal frame into the ground. I said, "You know that's illegal, right?"

Sign man said, "Are you a city councilor or a police?"

Me: "No, I'm a resident of this neighbourhood and you are polluting it."

Signman: "It is only for a few days, then I will come back and remove it." Ha!

Me: "That doesn't matter. It's illegal. As soon as you walk away, I'm going to remove it."

Signman: "You cannot do that. Only a city councilor or police can do that."

Me: "That's incorrect. I've called the City and they said it was fine to remove these any time."

Signman: "If you remove this sign, I will take your picture and I will sue you!"

Actual Photo of Me Throwing Out the Sign

Me: "Great! Excellent. I will give you my name and phone number right now. Let's exchange phone numbers and you can sue me."

Signman: "I don't want your name and number! I will take your picture!"

Now, I am not a lawyer, but I think it might be difficult to sue someone if you only have their photo, but not their name.

Me: "Ok, get ready." He backed up -- I assume because of Diego's presence -- and I stepped forward to slip the vinyl off the frame.

He took out his cell phone, and I smiled and posed with the crumpled sign. I normally hate being photographed, but this was fun.

As Diego and I walked away with the sign, Signman shouted after me, "See you in court!"

"See you there," I said. "Have a nice day!"

what i'm reading: the doubt factory, a young-adult thriller by paolo bacigalupi

A thriller about public relations? And for teens? It sounds improbable, and The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi is an improbably terrific book. Marrying a somersaulting plot with heart-pounding suspense to an unabashed political agenda and a hot love story, Bacigalupi has delivered a stunning youth read.

On the political front, we contemplate "the place where big companies go when they need the truth confused. . . . when they need science to say what’s profitable, instead of what’s true.” All the tricks of the trade - astroturfing, fronts, false flags, sock puppets, money funnelling, stealth marketing, planted news, and outright false data - are touched on, along with the human damage they cause.

And the political is nothing if not personal. Alix leads the good life of a private school girl in Connecticut, and is forced to confront the possibility that her privilege is built on other people's pain. That pain is impossible to miss, when she meets a group of homeless kids, all orphaned, one way or another, by her father's handiwork.

Pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fossil fuels - you name it, Alix's dad has helped confuse the public, shield wrongdoers, and ultimately cause the death of thousands, while a few brave class-action litigants are painted as selfish and greedy, and those who say otherwise are branded as conspiracy kooks.

Alix is attracted - perhaps dangerously so - to a young man who turns out to be the leader of a radical group focused on exposing her father's complicity in all that suffering. Betrayal lurks behind every door, but who will betray, who will be betrayed, and who will be exposed?

My only minor complaint is that the political agenda gets a teensy bit preachy at times. Preachy politics in fiction are usually a dealbreaker for me, but with The Doubt Factory, I was so hooked by the plot and the suspense that I didn't mind. More importantly, I don't think young readers would give it a second thought.

negative reviews and threats of lawsuits: let's not give in to corporate bullying

There's a new bully in town, and he's not going after fat kids in the school cafeteria. He's a corporate bully, and he's gunning for you, his dissatisfied customer.

An increasing number of companies are threatening lawsuits against customers who post negative online reviews about their products or services. At least one company has actually sued a former customer for defamation, based on negative reviews - and won.

This is a chilling development for anyone who cares about free speech, a free internet, and consumer advocacy. But it may not be as dire as it sounds.

A slightly more level playing field

We are bombarded with advertising at every turn. Everywhere we look, companies are claiming that their products will make us beautiful, cooler, more connected. That we'll look smarter, live longer, enjoy our lives more... if only we buy their products. Our world is filled with false advertising, if not by explicit claim, then certainly by implicit suggestion.

If these claims turn out to be untrue, there's little we can do about it.

In the past, when we complained about a company, our complaints reached very few ears. We could write a letter to their corporate headquarters, and we could tell our own contacts, but for an ordinary person with no media access, it ended there.

The internet has changed all that. Now consumers have the opportunity to create a slightly more level playing field. If we have a bad experience with a company, we can warn many more people away from their products and services.

Not only has the internet given us the means to spread the word, but internet culture encourages us to share information with others. When a product falls apart, when a contractor does shoddy work, when a restaurant offers consistently terrible service, we feel something bordering on a responsibility to warn others away from a similar experience.

(Is it a level playing field, even now? My post about bad customer service from Heys Luggage (here, plus two follow-ups) is Google-able if you're searching. But Heys' own advertising on billboards, in magazines, and online is visible by hundreds of thousands of people every day.)

The opportunity to share information online has been incredibly empowering for consumers. So perhaps it's not surprising that many companies are pushing back. Through letters threatening lawsuits, they are trying to frighten consumers away from the culture of information-sharing, and trying to create a culture of self-censorship. They are corporate bullies, and their ranks appear to be growing. I found numerous stories, most with sensational headlines designed to fuel the fear, warning people to watch what they say or they'll be sued.

A letter is not a lawsuit

Many of the news stories I've seen put the onus on the consumer to avoid potential threats. The Toronto Star's consumer reporter Ellen Roseman offers tips for consumers posting reviews, such as sticking to facts and avoiding inflammatory language. Good advice, for complaints and almost everything else. But stories like these don't address the basic inequity at play.

A consumer posts an online review that a company finds potentially damaging. The company refers the complaint to its attorney, who then writes a standard "cease and desist" letter. The letter demands the consumer remove the offending review from the internet and threatens a lawsuit. But - and this is the important bit for consumers to know - the letter doesn't mean there are solid grounds for a lawsuit. It doesn't mean that the company would necessarily win a lawsuit, or even that they would invest the resources in a legal proceeding in the first place. The letter is the equivalent of shaking your fist and saying, "Take that back, or else!" It looks official, what with the letterhead and legalese and all, but it has no teeth. They may use the word demand, but it's actually more like a request. (The cease and desist letter is also a necessary precursor to a potential future lawsuit.)

Sending a letter is low-impact for the company. It costs perhaps an hour of some lawyer's time. But for the person in receipt of the letter, it can be frightening. Even the possibility of a lawsuit is enough to get most people to retract their reviews. And so, even though the review was factual and there is little chance of being hurt by a lawsuit, the consumer deletes the review.

Now the company's bad behaviour is not exposed, and all it cost was a letter.

Nevertheless, even the threat of litigation is a powerful option for contractors. When a Toronto couple posted a 2,000-word negative review about their $400 home improvement project, their contractor threatened litigation unless the review was removed. Intimidated, the couple revised their review to a mere 30 mild words.

In this case, it sounds like the consumers might have been a little over the top. Was it really necessary to post 2,000 words? Would a factual and not-heated 50 words have avoided the threat of litigation? Perhaps. But the threat of litigation was effective. The consumers were bullied, and the review was diluted.

As a customer-service person, I find it a bit mind-boggling that a company would choose this route, rather than practice a bit of damage-control. A legal spokesperson for Yelp - which was involved in an actual lawsuit - said:

Litigation is not a good substitute for customer service. Businesses that try to sue their customers into silence rarely prevail, end up wasting their own time and money, and usually bring additional, unwanted attention to the original criticism.

In one case, a company threatened a lawsuit against a consumer who posted a negative review... then Amazon dropped the company from their website. Then there was the crazy restaurateur in Ottawa, whose online bullying made international news.* OK, it was only The Daily Mail. But still.

Dietz v. Perez

The one documented instance where a contractor followed through on the lawsuit threat - where a customer was actually sued - was far from typical. Following the reports as the story developed, I could tell that there was a lot of bad blood between the two parties. The contractor and the homeowner apparently knew each other before the work was done; the consumer claims her home was damaged and her jewelry was stolen; the contractor was claiming $750,000 in damages. The fact that the case even went to trial speaks of two parties that have dug in their heels. Most consumer lawsuits are settled out of court.

But to the dismay of free-speech and consumer advocates, the consumer was found guilty of defamation, although no damages were awarded. And the court ruled that the offending review would remain online, unaltered.

So, that happened. The threat of a lawsuit may actually turn into a lawsuit.

Does that mean if you write a factual negative review, you will be sued? No, it doesn't.

This is an important piece to remember. Follow good behaviour guidelines. Stick to the facts. Avoid sweeping generalizations. Don't get personal. (Ellen Roseman's guidelines are very good.) But if you do receive a letter from a company, take a deep breath. Read the letter carefully. Anyone can threaten anything. It doesn't mean they have grounds for an actual lawsuit, or that they'll choose to invest the resources in one, even if they do.

Let's not be bullied

To be sure, the consumer is not always right. There are people with an axe to grind, there are lies and exaggerations. There are trolls. So if you feel your business has been unfairly maligned, what recourse do you have? TripAdvisor offers restaurant and resort management the opportunity to respond to negative reviews. Smart management will apologize, thank the customer, and pledge better future service. Not-so-smart management gets into arguments on the TripAdvisor site.

Online reviews are potentially powerful tools. We have a responsibility to use them wisely. But let's not be afraid to use them at all.


* An Ottawa restaurant owner was so furious - and, it would seem, so unbalanced - that she sought to disparage the customer's reputation with the customer's employer. She sent "sexually suggestive e-mails" to the woman's workplace, and created an explicit dating profile in her name. In this case, the customer sued, and the restaurant owner was found guilty of libel. As far as I can tell, the customer posted one bad review, and the restaurant owner hounded her for two and a half years. In other words, a crackpot troll.

the gluten-free hoax: nutritionism run amok

Today I saw a bag of high-end cheese puffs, made with organic corn and real cheese. WHEAT FREE and GLUTEN FREE, the package boasted, which made me chuckle. Yup, just like all cheese puffs for all time. Like most snack food, cheese puffs are made of corn, and corn does not contain gluten.

Marketing old products with a new twist to take advantage of a nutrition craze is nothing new, of course. I remember when fat-free and low-fat labels were slapped on everything. (This craze happened to coincide with some of my worst dieting addiction.) In those days, supermarket shelves were laden with fat-free cookies and other snack food, all of which were loaded with white sugar and other empty calories. Candy that is little more than sugar cubes with artificial colouring and flavouring would be advertised as fat-free. About a decade later, globules of saturated fat, salt, and nitrates were hawked as zero grams of carbs per serving.

I've wondered what the next craze of nutritionism would be. Now that carbohydrates are no longer the work of the devil, what would we all rush to eliminate from our diets?

I've been gluten-free

A long time ago, a doctor thought some issues of Allan's were caused by celiac disease or at least a gluten sensitivity. So I can honestly say, I was gluten-free before gluten-free was cool! We learned all about what a diet containing gluten can do to a gluten-sensitive person. It isn't pretty.

We purged our home and most of our restaurant eating of gluten. When we didn't see the expected results, we read it could take a long time to repair past damage, or we must have slipped up, or... maybe come back for more tests.

Over the years, as will happen, we became less disciplined about eating gluten. Recently our doctor confirmed that Allan is not celiac, and likely never was. So I've been everywhere on the spectrum from completely gluten free to not caring about it at all. I do know some people who have celiac disease, but I never imagined that eliminating gluten from ordinary diets would become some kind of moral imperative.

If it sounds too good to be true...

These days we are urged to believe that everything from cancer to diabetes to Alzheimer's is caused by gluten. And that should be a clue to what's really going on. When normal foods that humans have eaten for millennia are suddenly called poison, your hoax alert should be lighting up. (Similarly, when a food or a diet or a nutrient is said to cure a wide range of disease, be highly skeptical.)

Turns out there's not much science behind any of the claims for eliminating gluten. What science exists is all "...a correlation was found," and "a possible association may exist," and based on one or two studies with insignificant sample sizes. Conclusions are leapt to, wild extrapolations announced as fact, with a healthy dose of fear-mongering thrown in. After all, don't you want to prevent dementia?

Here's another trope that should set your bullshit-detector blaring: diet claims that evoke the lives of early humans. This is familiar ground in the diet industry, so adept at exploiting the disconnection and alienation of consumer culture and the vertiginous rate of change, along with the media-fostered sense that we are all so unhealthy (despite all evidence - life expectancy up, infant morality down - to the contrary). Where once we wished to "get back to the land," now we imagine we can get back to the cave.

Several very popular gluten-free diet seeks to "realign" our eating with that of our hunter-gatherer (and gluten-free!) ancestors, who supposedly never suffered from dementia. But as James Hamblin points out in "This Is Your Brain on Gluten":

In the Paleolithic Era, human life expectancy was around 30 years. Even accounting for childhood deaths and tramplings by wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceri, humans did not live past their 50s. I wonder often why these are the times we cite as a standard of health. The paucity of old age should in itself explain why Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease were basically nonexistent, shouldn’t it?

Truth is, the authors of these diets know very little about what early humans ate, how their brains differed from ours, or even whether or not they were healthy. They certainly don't know if early humans had dementia.

I have no wish to deny anyone's personal experience. People with a gluten sensitivity absolutely feel better when they eat gluten-free. And many people without gluten sensitivity find their lives enhanced by reducing the gluten in their diets. A gluten-reduced diet is usually lower in processed foods and higher in fruits, vegetables, protein, and whole grains. That is, a healthier diet. So of course they feel better.

But if being gluten-free means a diet full of commercially processed foods labelled "gluten-free," the general rule applies: garbage in, garbage out.

This is your brain on advertising

To me the gluten-free fad is a prime example of what Michael Pollan calls "nutritionism," the ideology that reduces eating to the intake of specific nutrients, such as antioxidants, omega 3, cholesterol... or gluten. In some of Pollan's tweets to "glutenphobes," he has pointed out this Scientific American article about how unhealthy a gluten-free diet can be (not unlike the fat-free diet of the 1980s) and these two from The Atlantic: A Gluten-Free Diet Reality Check and This Is Your Brain on Gluten, the latter a thorough debunking. I didn't want to recreate their arguments here, but if you're skeptical about my skepticism, please do click.

I think what bothers me most about these nutritionism trends isn't the junk science or the fictions about our hunter-gatherer ancestors but the amnesia that enables their success. First we try to eliminate all the fat from our diet, and end up fatter and unhealthier. Then we try the same thing with carbohydrates, until it's obvious that, too, is unsustainable and doesn't work. But now we run off to eliminate another ordinary, (to most people) harmless, naturally occurring substance, as if we haven't heard it all before.

If you're eating gluten-free, I hope it's working out for you. It is definitely working out for marketers, advertisers, diet-book authors, and commercial producers of crappy, unhealthy, gluten-free food.

military propaganda at sports events reaches new extremes: continuous recruitment ads at baseball games

I've recently returned from a lovely trip to Boston, filled with so many of my favourite things: friends, family, books, and baseball.

I love Fenway Park, and I'm always happy to be there. On this trip, we saw three great games, two of them wins, so I was thrilled. The games were marred by only one thing: nearly constant propaganda for the US military. This is not an exaggeration.

Throughout Fenway Park, as in many sports venues, monitors show a TV feed of the action on the field. Right now, between innings, the Fenway Park monitors show a continuous feed of advertising for the United States Army. During the game, the ads continue on a sidebar beside the action.

Let that sink in a moment. The constant advertising crammed into every moment of the ballgame, and the constant linking of sports and the military, are now joined in this doubly offensive development.

There is something particularly Orwellian about watching a baseball game while a constant stream of silent images of war and military run in your peripheral vision.

I gathered from the brief branding displays that the ad feed is supplied by Access Sports Media. According to its website, Access Sports Media

provides advertisers cross-platform solutions engaging passionate fans in sports venues nationwide through digital out of home, social media, mobile, and in-venue sponsorships. Access Sports reaches more than 110 million viewers annually through a national footprint of 200 sports properties and a digital network of over 20,000 screens across professional, minor league and college sports.

Its list of clients includes many major corporations, a few specific products, and - listed first - the US Army.

The Army ads themselves stem from a campaign written about here in The New York Times, called a "reality" theme without a trace of irony. Of course, it bears little resemblance to reality. There are no bombings, no destroyed villages, no torture prisons. No amputations, no traumatic brain injury, no alcoholism, no domestic violence, no suicides.

The ads are built around the slogan "Army Strong": "There's strong, then there's Army Strong". This is a particularly good sell for a Boston-area audience: after the Boston Marathon bombing, the city rallied to a cry of "Boston Strong". The Times article notes that the ads are

an example of what is known on Madison Avenue as a program-length commercial or infomercial. Once the province of gadgets peddled with hard-sales entreaties like, “But wait, there’s more,” such longer spiels have been embraced by well-known brands like AT&T, Bing, Chase and Teleflora, along with a number of automakers.

Program-length commercials are becoming more popular as part of a trend known as content marketing, sponsored content or branded entertainment. The trend is meant to counter the growing habit — particularly among younger consumers, like the target audience for the Army, ages 18 to 24 — of ignoring traditional forms of advertising.

The "Army Strong" ads at Fenway are a barrage of quick-cut images emphasizing camaraderie and bonding, toughness and strength, dirt and grit, and stirring patriotism. Men (I saw no female soldiers in the ads, although there might be one somewhere) worked hard and played hard, always together, often dirty, but always serious and strong. In a world where career choices often involve life behind a desk or tethered to a computer, the men in these ads were running across rugby fields, rappelling down snow-covered mountainsides, parachuting out of airplanes, and using lots of exciting-looking equipment.

Only two quick images gave any hint as to why so many men are running, rappelling, shooting, and seeing the world through night-vision goggles. In one image, a woman in a hijab slides a slip of paper in a ballot box. In another, a group of soldiers sit in a circle in a tent, listening to a traditionally-dressed Afghan man (or, I should say, an actor dressed as one). What's the caption here? "How many weddings did we bomb today?" "You take the oil, we'll keep the heroin"? Or maybe just "Me smokem peace pipe."

As both Allan and I have written about before (here, here, and here, for example), there is already a huge amount of military propaganda inappropriately linked to sports events. The Boston Red Sox and the many other teams that contract with Access Sports Media - a list is here - now take the trend to new extremes.

I wrote this to the Boston Red Sox. If you are a sports fan who finds this advertising offensive, I hope you will speak up to your team's management, too.

I am a Red Sox fan who lives out of town. I am able to enjoy games at Fenway about every-other year, at best. I love Fenway Park, and thus, when I attended three games against the Texas Rangers last week, I was extremely disheartened to be subjected to continuous military recruitment advertisements.

Many young people, especially those from low-income families, believe what they see in the United States Army's ads and enlist, only to find the reality gravely different. Of course, who would ever sign up if the ads showed the truth? Amputations, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder; rampant alcoholism and domestic violence, skyrocketing suicide rates.

By partnering with Access Sports Media to show these deceptive ads at Fenway Park, the Red Sox are complicit in that deception.

The Red Sox Foundation promotes the "Run to Home Base," which raises money to "provide much needed services to local veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan... with combat stress disorders and/or traumatic brain injuries". At the same time, the Red Sox are helping to ensure that more healthy young men and women will eventually need those services.

The constant showing of military propaganda during a baseball game is inappropriate and offensive. I hope the Boston Red Sox will reconsider the decision to run Access Sports Media's US Army recruitment ads during games.

two great reads from the new yorker, part 2: jill lepore on political advertising

The current New Yorker stories by Joseph Mitchell has given me an opportunity to post something I've been meaning to share for ages.

Last September, Jill Lepore unearthed an incredible bit of history, a piece of the American past that is  alive with us today, and more dangerous than ever. (I am generally interested in anything Lepore writes; last year I gushed over her reviews of books about Clarence Darrow, one of my abiding heroes.)

In this piece, Lepore writes about the roots of political advertising - the falsehoods and trickery, the lies and slander, the deception and distortion, the swiftboating and smearing that make us grit our teeth in frustration. The advertising firms that design and disseminate those orchestrated lies can be traced back to one company, an operation called Campaigns Inc.

Its first victim was Upton Sinclair, the writer and socialist and one-time candidate for Governor of California. He called it The Lie Factory.

In 1934, Sinclair explained what did happen that election year, in a nonfiction sequel called “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.” “When I was a boy, the President of Harvard University wrote about ‘the scholar in politics,’ ” Sinclair began. “Here is set forth how a scholar went into politics, and what happened to him.” “How I Got Licked” was published in daily installments in fifty newspapers. In it, Sinclair described how, immediately after the Democratic Convention, the Los Angeles Times began running on its front page a box with an Upton Sinclair quotation in it, a practice that the paper continued, every day, for six weeks, until the opening of the polls. “Reading these boxes day after day,” Sinclair wrote, “I made up my mind that the election was lost.”

Sinclair got licked, he said, because the opposition ran what he called a Lie Factory. “I was told they had a dozen men searching the libraries and reading every word I had ever published.” They’d find lines he’d written, speeches of fictional characters in novels, and stick them in the paper, as if Sinclair had said them. “They had a staff of political chemists at work, preparing poisons to be let loose in the California atmosphere on every one of a hundred mornings.” Actually, they had, at the time, a staff of only two, and the company wasn’t called the Lie Factory. It was called Campaigns, Inc.

Campaigns, Inc., the first political-consulting firm in the history of the world, was founded, in 1933, by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter.

If you like history and you deplore the Lie Factory, you will love this article: The Lie Factory: How politics became a business, by Jill Lepore.

it's time we all starved the trolls: stop reading comments on mainstream news stories

Robert Fisk has a good piece in The Independent about the incivility (to put it mildly!) that is endemic in the comment sections of online news stories: "Anonymous trolls are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate the gutless journalism of the New York Times, BBC, and CNN".

Fisk wonders why newspapers that will not publish an anonymous letter to the editor will allow anonymous lies and hateful screed in comments. Surely he knows the simple answer: money. Advertisers are paying for clicks, and the idiots in the comments section are increasing the clickage.

Why should we help them by reading those comments? Consider this.

We know that governments pay people to troll the comments section with disinformation and misinformation, just like they hire fake journalists and bribe working columnists to influence public opinion.

We know that the number of comments in any one direction cannot be taken as a gauge of public opinion. When Common Dreams responded to a flood of reader complaints after they opened articles for comments, they learned that one person was posting under more than 50 names.

So:

1. Media needs comments to generate advertising income.

2. Governments pay people to write comments.

3. Comments that may appear to represent a majority may be written by one or two people.

4. We have no idea how much #2 and #3 overlap.

Every time I share these facts, at least one person has not heard them before. This has led me to make it a personal mission: to always ignore comments to online news stories and to always encourage others to do the same. I hope you will join me in this mission.

Many people seem to believe that these comments reflect public opinion. They may or may not - we have no way of knowing. The only thing we know that comments reflect is corporate media's need for clicks.

Media sites won't close down their comments sections anytime soon, not as long as clicks are associated with income. But we have a choice.

I know it can sometimes be seductive. You want to see what people are saying. Don't go there. Refuse to look. Refuse to click. Remind yourself: you will not learn anything, the ignorance and hate will upset or anger you, and you will change nothing.

What's more, it's not an effective use of our time. If we're busy reading and responding to comments, we're not building a movement to change the world. Think of it this way: Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney would love it if we spent our time responding to comments on news stories.

That sewer of hate and lies lives on clicks. The only way it will die is if we starve it.

help defend whistleblowers who defend animals: marineland suing former employees who went public on animal abuse

Company abuses animals/the environment/labour.

Employee comes forward to make the abuse public.

Company tries to silence employee.

It's an old story, and it repeats itself again and again, in many different contexts. You've seen it dramatized in movies like Silkwood and Erin Brockovich. It's what Bradley Manning is going through on a grand scale.

Whistleblowers risk their jobs, and in some cases their lives, to stand up for others. Often, without whistleblowers, we would never know the truth. That's why we have an obligation to stand up for whistleblowers.

If you live in Ontario and watch any television, you've seen the ads for Marineland, with that cloying song: They come from a land of ice and snow, now belugas have a home in On-tar-ee-o... Everyone loves Marineland... Everyone loves Marineland...

That chorus is bitterly ironic. If the residents of Marineland could speak, I doubt those marine mammals would say they love living in unhealthy water that causes constant eye irritation and blindness, being held in waterless concrete pens, living alone (a practice that amounts to a prison of solitary confinement, banned for marine mammals in the US), bleeding, neglected, abused. But these animals can't speak, and they can't leave, and they can't change the conditions of their lives.

Trainers at Marineland were so upset about conditions there, and so frustrated at being unable to make improvements, that they quit their jobs, and went public.

Now Marineland is suing them for $1.5 million.

A fund has been started to help with the mounting costs of their legal defence. If you can give, any amount will help. As little as $5.00 or $10.00 will make a difference. Click here to donate.

Background, all from the Toronto Star:

Marineland animals suffering, former staffers say

Marineland: Heartache for Smooshi the walrus as top trainer quits

Ontario SPCA to inspect Marineland

‘Everyone loves Marineland!’ singer wants voice pulled from commercials

Marineland: Killer whale bleeding for months, trainer says

Marineland sues former trainer Christine Santos for $1.25 million for Toronto Star article

Donate to Christine Santos' legal defence here.