slamboard

The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.

After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.

Comments have been enabled on ‘Papers of Record’ since long before the birth of the Internet. A letter to the editor is in many ways the same exercise as making a comment on the website of a newspaper.

The difference is immediacy. I have never in my life written a letter to the editor. My wife has written at least one that I know of, by email.

One of my best friends was very upset about a journalist referring to the smoke that came out of a local industrial complex as steam. By the time he had handwritten a letter, he had lost his head of steam and he didn’t bother actually mailing it.

These days, the major newspapers are adding comments to their online content, with varying levels of moderation. Some appear to be completely unmoderated. Some are reviewed almost as stringently as letters to the editor. I strongly suspect that some are moderated with bias. When you get hundreds or thousands of comments, the opportunity to bolster your agenda by selective approval and rejection is tremendous.

A story in the LA Times about the Obama and Clinton campaigns has almost ten thousand published comments. I only read one page and it contained several comments that were eviscerating a previous comment that had been one of the many comments arguing that Obama lacks substance. It seemed a bit excessive and redundant. Maybe these are unmoderated comments. The TOS for user contributions are very exhaustive.

I have been critical of scientology in the past on this blog and elsewhere. The organization that sometimes calls itself a religion and sometimes doesn’t is presently under attack by a disorganized group of people who revel in the power of the mob without apology or reflection. The fact that they are focused on a big, bad target at the moment does not make them the good guys. They have been known to wreak havoc on an individual’s online activities and personal privacy for the simple reason that the individual was enjoying what the group perceived as unwarranted celebrity. Another group of people who get attacked are randomly chosen from a list of hacked passwords for MySpace and other social websites.

I am in no way optimistic about their attack on scientology because I know that the group has a very short collective attention span. The only meme that doesn’t get old is complaining about old memes.

I remember back when I was a little kid hearing Rod Roddy mentioning something about California Emissions when he was gushing about A NEW CAR!!! on The Price is Right. I was living up in rural Canada where people where still tearing the catalytic converters off of their pickup trucks and I was mystified by the importance of these things. California is a big state with a huge economy and its progressive legislation usually reaches beyond its own borders.

The EPA recently refused to allow California to enact new laws regulating CO2 emissions from automobiles. The most recent news related to the fight between the agency charged with protecting the environment and the state of California involves EPA infighting. The word is that staff felt compelled to tell the EPA Administrator that the decision will likely be reversed by a federal judge.

I knew before I even looked it up that this administrator had been given his job by the GWB administration. I was surprised to see that he was a 27 year veteran of the EPA. Before that he worked as the Director of Operations at Hazelton Laboratories Corporation, a lab that has more recently been accused of rampant primate abuse. I don’t know if they were smashing monkey heads under his watch.

I felt that it was important to come clean about the fact that I sometimes delete comments. Sometimes is is a pretty easy decision, like when I got this short comment about how to make my penis bigger…

There are times when it appears that a comment has been written by a real live human being who works for a competitor of the company that I reviewed in my post. If the comment makes a valid point, I am tempted to leave it on my blog. The trouble is that doing this would encourage the behavior. The behavior seems to involve cyber stalking the competition and commenting on review posts with links going to the site that they are promoting. I mostly delete them but sometimes I just remove the links.

I went to a diet site that I was thinking about possibly reviewing and I found myself slightly offended by the degree to which the web designer had attempted to make the Google Ads look like content. I don’t want to be accused of hypocrisy, I have ads by Google on this blog. They are placed on the page in a very conventional way. I have seen a discussion in the blogosphere in which someone said that a page looks naked to them without these standard, unobtrusive contextual ads.

Anyway, I don’t put ads inside the body of my blog posts, even though that is an accepted practice. The website that I am criticizing has a landing page in which the title indicates that a list is to follow. The title even has a colon at the end. Immediately below the title are a series of ads. When the content starts below the ads, they are almost identical in size and format to the ads. It seems deceptive and dishonest to me.

Below the jump on this page is a long form sales pitch for the Magnetic Diet, which seems to be a scam.

This needs to be seen.

I am posting this because of it’s implications about how big business is in control of how news is reported. I don’t want to be alarmist about the story that FOX killed at the behest of Monsanto. I have a degree in agriculture and I was part of a big discussion about the use of hormone injections in the dairy industry in one of my classes. My professor was very much in favor of the practice. This was during the period of time in which it was unclear which way the Canadian government agency was going to swing on this issue. The use of low levels of antibiotics in feed for animals that are raised for meat production is, in my mind, a much greater human risk and it is a practice that is widespread.

Canada prohibits the use of rbST because of its adverse health effects on cows, not humans.

I was a bit dismayed when I saw a blogger telling a bald faced lie on the official Google blog. If you read the official Google blog and you truly believe that NORAD tracks Santa with Google, I have some news for you. There is no Santa Claus. Your parent or legal guardian wrote that letter from Santa apologizing for not being able to get a Wii

The Magic Chicken Diet has striking similarities to Kimkins and some key differences. The moderately priced lifetime membership model mirrors Kimkins to a T. A hike from an earlier amount to its present fee of just over $60 lags just behind a similar hike that occurred with Kimkins. There is an publicly available page where someone who is presumably now the webmaster of the site was asking for bids on site design. Here is one sentence from his description of the project:

I would like it to be a clone of www. kimkins.com with ability to change background color and easily edited on my end as a webmaster for editing, adding pictures .

I am not shocked by this. Web business, like every other kind of business involves attempting to replicate the success of others. One big difference here is that the founder and spokeswoman for this diet appears to be a genuine weight loss success story, with a progress slideshow and a first and last name. The question of whether this woman has a plan that involves healthy choices cannot be answered by the uninitiated. From the name, we have to assume that it involves chicken.

I do not know if this site has good information and support for weight loss. I do not know whether the owner is monetizing something with real value or just taking advantage of people. In any case, I would suggest that she change to a payment form that inspires more confidence. There are PayPal logos on the site, but the payment does not appear to be through PayPal. You fill in your credit card information on a very basic submit form.

I am spreading the word about an incident involving some very egregious customer service on the part of Primus. My friend’s father was on vacation in the Dominican Republic when he had a medical emergency that required surgery. His departure from that country was delayed and his son flew in from Canada to assist him. This unexpected adverse event required an unusual amount of telephone usage and a exorbitant amount of roaming charges. Shortly after this 75 year old man finally returned to Canada, his telecommunications provider contacted him about the abnormal charges and demanded IMMEDIATE payment.

His bill was not due and he insisted that he wanted to see the bill before he made any payment. Almost immediately after this exchange, they cut off his mobile service, his land line telephone service and his internet service. That’s mean. He made no indication that he was unable or unwilling to pay his bill, he simply wanted to see it in black and white first.

I am not going to make the argument that they can’t do this. They say in careful language on their TOS that they can. Here is the specific statement that seem to cover this situation:

I have to wonder if they have a policy of pulling this crap on customers that incur large bills because they are a group that is most likely to leave for another carrier. They may want to get that suspension fee before the customers cancel on their own. Cutting off a 75 year old man’s phone service without notice is not something that most of us would do simply because we can.

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