Category: Amazon

Why Are the Feds Monitoring Me?

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Email from Amazon:

Hello Associate,
This is a reminder of your disclosure obligations under the Operating Agreement. Any time you share an affiliate link, it’s important to disclose that to your audience. They will trust you more if you are transparent about where you are directing them and why. To meet the Associate Program’s requirements, you must (1) include a legally compliant disclosure with your links and (2) identify yourself on your Site as an Amazon Associate with the language required by the Operating Agreement. To comply with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations, your link-level disclosure must be:1. Clear. A clear disclosure could be as simple as “(paid link)”, “#ad” or “#CommissionsEarned”.2. Conspicuous. It should be placed near any affiliate link or product review in a location that customers will notice easily. They shouldn’t have to hunt for it.In addition, the Operating Agreement requires that the following statement clearly and conspicuously appears on your Site: “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” For social media user-generated content, this statement must be associated with your account.Associates should also consider the relevant social media platform’s guidelines. For example, Associates may use Facebook’s Branded Content tool. To read more about the FTC Endorsement Guides, visit: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking#affiliate. Visit this page on AC to bookmark this information about disclosures.
Thank you, Amazon Associates Program

What exactly the hell is a “legally compliant disclosure”? In case anyone doesn’t understand, under the Amazon Associates program, anytime you visit Amazon through my links here, I get a small commission (at no cost to you) on every purchase you make during that visit. Because I’ve always been “transparent” — hey, give me your money, this is a capitalist blog! — I can’t imagine any reader feels they have been deceived when I do an affiliate link (usually to a book title) on the blog. But now, apparently, somebody went and got the doggone Federal Government involved, and I’m supposed to include an officially-approved “disclosure” on every single link? What the hell is the point of electing Donald Trump president if he can’t put a stop to this kind of meddlesome regulation? It’s not like I’ve been defrauding my readers or doing some kind of shady scam here.

Anyway, now I’m going to have to read the fine print on my Operating Agreement now, but you’d better believe some of my friends in the Trump administration will get an earful about this. I pay taxes on my income, and I don’t expect my tax money to be used to pay a bunch of pointy-head bureaucrats at the FTC to monitor my blog!


 

Two Thumbs Up for ‘Jack Ryan’

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While I was visiting my son at Fort Bragg a couple of weeks ago, I started watching the eight-episode first season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime. Generally speaking, I never read or watch fiction, and the only TV I watch is news, sports, documentaries or true-crime shows like A & E’s The First 48 or Forensic Files on HLN.

This disclaimer is necessary to explaining why I was mystified when I told people I was watching Jack Ryan and everyone reacted by saying, “Oh, the guy from The Office.” Yes, lead actor (and co-producer) John Krasinski is best-known for this popular NBC sitcom which I have never watched. On the rare occasions I’ve caught a few scenes of reruns of The Office while changing channels, I found it painfully unwatchable. The Office is wretched, and if you think it’s funny, you need to contemplate how your life went so dreadfully wrong, but I digress . . .

With no Office-influenced preconceptions of who John Krasinski is, I did have preconceptions of what a Tom Clancy thriller is about. Some 30 years ago, my older brother Kirby, a big Tom Clancy fan, convinced me to read a couple of Clancy’s novels including one, The Sum of All Fears, that was ruined in the movie version by political correctness (and the casting of Ben Affleck as Ryan). The plot of Clancy’s novel was a late Cold War-era drama about “a crisis concerning the Middle East peace process where Palestinian and former East German terrorists conspire to bring the United States and Soviet Union into nuclear war.” This was realistic, because in fact there was cooperation between Palestinian terrorists and Communists, but in the movie version, the bad guys are South African neo-Nazis. This shifting of the locus of evil — from left to right, as it were — was a 180-degree reversal of meaning, a work of Cultural Marxism that Herbert Marcus might praise. But again I digress . . .

Is there political correctness in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan? Yes, in that Ryan’s CIA mentor James Greer is portrayed as a convert to Islam. This makes no sense on any level, especially when you recall the Cold War context of the original Clancy novels. Would it have been OK for Greer to have been a Marxist ideologue? Of course not, and while fighting Islamic terrorism is a different thing than fighting the threat of Communist aggression, one might suppose it would occur to the producers of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan how wildly inappropriate this Greer-as-Muslim subplot is. Nevertheless, it is only a subplot, and while it obtrudes like a politically correct sore thumb whenever it’s referenced, these instances are mercifully rare, and are only a minor distraction from the general excellence of this action thriller. And wow, what a thriller!

From the first episode, which concludes with an exciting firefight at a U.S. outpost in Yemen, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan delivers the kind of action scenes you’d expect from a big-budget movie blockbuster. In that sense, this Amazon series follows the path paved by HBO’s Game of Thrones, delivering movie-style thrills to the home viewer, as the premium tent-pole that makes it worthwhile to buy the delivery service. And despite the occasional nod to political correctness, there is an element of realism in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan that makes it enjoyable. The firefight at the Yemen base, for example, will seem very familiar to anyone who recalls the 2012 terrorist attack at Benghazi that killed four Americans.

Likewise, there is a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to the subplot in which the wife of the terrorist leader escapes Syria with her daughters and makes her way to a refugee camp on the Turkish border. She wants to go to Europe, but this is not possible because of the recent terrorist attack in Paris that her husband masterminded. This subplot perfectly encapsulates the 2015 “refugee” crisis, when Europeans were expected to welcome with open arms millions of Muslim immigrants while Islamic terrorists were slaughtering the innocent in Paris, attacking Charlie Hebdo, and running over people in Nice. No amount of sympathy for genuine refugees, nor any politically correct pro-Muslim propaganda, could have prevented the backlash against unrestricted immigration that has since empowered the Right in Europe. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan endeavors to humanize the Muslim victims of this crisis, but it also dramatizes the actual danger posed by terrorists exploiting loopholes in the West’s immigration policies. For example, the terrorist villain Mousa Bin Suleiman makes it through U.S. Customs by going through Canada with forged documents and showing up with his preteen son who needs medical treatment for diabetes.

Didactic lessons about terrorism and immigration, of course, are not the selling-point of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. No, it’s about suspense and thrills and action! action! action! The producers do a good job of pacing the show, so that each of the eight episodes builds to an exciting climactic scene and, by the time you’ve binge-watched your way to the end (my wife and I watched the final four episodes Saturday night), a lot of details in the early episodes that may have seemed irrelevant are revealed as important foreshadowing. It is no mere coincidence, for example, that Jack Ryan’s love interest, Dr. Cathy Mueller, is an epidemiologist concerned with an ebola outbreak. But hey, no spoilers.

Probably most of my readers have already seen Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, but if you haven’t seen it yet, go ahead and buy it through the Amazon links here, because as a participant in the Amazon Affiliate program, I get a tiny commission on everything you buy through these links — greedy capitalist blogger that I so am proud to be.



 

Amazon’s Digital ‘Fahrenheit 451’

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An unbook by an unperson gets unpublished:

Every day now seems to bring more news of people being banned from social media, fired from their jobs, or even targeted for violence for expressing disagreement with liberals. Recent victims of this ongoing purge include Infowars host Alex Jones, White House speechwriter Darren Beattie and bestselling author David Horowitz. Evidence continues to accumulate that the billionaire Democrats who control companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google are pursuing a campaign to suppress or silence conservative voices.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 seems to have inspired a climate of paranoia in Silicon Valley. Anyone suspected of dissenting from progressive orthodoxies could become the next target in this digital purge, where accusations of “hate” are used to justify the suppression of politically incorrect voices. However, the most remarkable — and perhaps the most ominous — example of how out-of-control the Left’s anti-free speech agenda has become involves a target who isn’t even involved in politics.
Daryush Valizadeh, a/k/a “Roosh V,” is a legendary 39-year-old pickup artist (PUA) who became notorious for a series of books describing his libidinous forays in European countries (Bang Iceland, Bang Estonia, etc.). His popularity eventually made him a target of feminists, and the Southern Poverty Law Center actually declared Roosh’s website Return of Kings a “hate group.”All of this, you understand, because Roosh shares advice to help single guys learn how to “score” with women. Males who pursue heterosexual activity are now guilty of “misogyny” and “male supremacy,” according to the SPLC.
College kids nowadays probably won’t believe this, but once upon time, even liberals approved of heterosexuality, which was a favorite activity of such notable Democrats as former President Bill Clinton and members of the Kennedy family. Unlike the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Chappaquiddick), Daryush Valizadeh has never left a girl to die in the backseat of a submerged Oldsmobile, but times have changed and any man advocating heterosexuality in the 21st century risks being placed on the SPLC “hate list.”
The Left’s crusade to abolish heterosexuality reached frightening new extremes this week when Amazon banned Roosh’s books. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.



 

Birthday Week And The Admiral Of The Ocean Sea

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— Wombat-socho


This week all three of us that run this here blog celebrate our birthdays, and in fact today’s my 55th birthday. As Mickey Mantle once said, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” All that aside, since I can’t afford to buy everyone a beer in celebration, I did the next best thing and knocked the price of my book, The Last Falangist, down to 99 cents for the weekend, including Columbus Day, about which more momentarily. I would have given it away for free today, but apparently it costs little enough already that Amazon won’t let me do that.


On a related topic, the deranged Anglo racists of Seattle have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This insults not only Italian-Americans, who have long claimed the Admiral of the Ocean Sea as a hero on account of his Genoese origins, but Latinos such as myself who realize that without him, everybody south of the Rio Grande would be speaking Portuguese, or even worse, Gaelic. Lies about Christopher Columbus abound, and since the best way to fight lies is with truth, I summon to the field of battle the eminent naval historian and retired admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea is an honest look at the life and career of the great mariner who opened America to European colonization. A shorter version (the Reader’s Digest edition, if you will) is his Christopher Columbus, Mariner. Finally, if you want to go right to the source, there is Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, translated and edited by Morison. Columbus may not have been a stainless hero (who is?) but he deserves better than the lies peddled by Howard Zinn and other revisionist scumballs.


The Last Falangist – 99 Cents Through Monday!

Blame @Instapundit for This

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Late Surge in Web Buying
Blindsides UPS, Retailers

What caused this unexpected surge in online buying? Sunday, I put up a post about Justine Sacco that included this:

[H]er liberalism (like all liberalism) is misguided, assuming as it does that the problem of AIDS in Africa (or any similar social problem) results from a shortage of caring. This is a species of Magic Thinking: “We could solve this problem, if only we cared enough.” And from this delusion, we get a lot of empty gestures that do nothing to solve problems, but make people feel good about themselves.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book about this, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy – a book that no liberal has ever bothered to read, because if they bothered to read it, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.

That post got linked by Instapundit, with the result that Sunday’s traffic was 170% higher than Saturday’s traffic and, over a two-day period, we sold 39 copies of The Vision of the Anointed (19 in print, 20 as Kindle e-books) via our Amazon Affiliate links, as well as 72 other items sold at Amazon, including a Garmin GPS navigator and a 4-terabyte external hard drive. Probably, Amazon and UPS just couldn’t deal with that monster blitz of orders.

For those who ordered The Vision of the Anointed, I promise I’m not exaggerating: It’s the best single-volume analysis of liberalism ever written and could cure the delusions of any liberal who reads it (assuming that the liberal is intelligent enough to understand it, admittedly a large assumption). And once they’re through reading that, maybe they’ll want to try reading Sowell’s The Quest for Comic Justice in which, among other feats, he dismantles Lenin’s Imperialism in less than two pages.

While I can’t speak for Instapundit, on behalf of myself and Thomas Sowell, I apologize to America for crashing Amazon and UPS, but destroying liberalism requires certain sacrifices.

 

 

Thanks to the Reader Who Bought ‘Call of Duty: Ghosts’ From Our Amazon Links!

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There’s still time to do your last-minute Christmas shopping via our Amazon Associates holiday specials, and this week somebody ordered the hottest game of the year, “Call of Duty: Ghosts” for an Xbox 360 system. (It’s also available for PlayStation and other systems.) The sale price was $47.99 and, as with all sales from our Amazon links, we got a small commission at no cost to you.

Among the other Amazon purchases this week, readers bought an Alexander Del Rossa designer fleece bathrobe for $49.99 and a Lenox Portola 65-Piece Flatware Set for $127.49.

 

 

Let’s face it: You don’t want to go to the mall and fight those crowds, just to find they don’t have what you want, or they don’t have it in the right size or color. Who needs that hassle? Just click the link, shop around Amazon and have it shipped in time for Christmas!

And if you’re not sure what to buy that special someone? Just get them an Amazon Gift Card and have it shipped in a special gift box.

 

 

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Thanks to the Reader Who Bought the LG Electronics 32-Inch LED TV from Amazon

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Is anyone else old enough to remember when a 24-inch TV screen was considered top-of-the-line? Out of curiosity, I took a measuring tape to the home entertainment station in my office (purchased circa 2007) and found that the space for the TV measures 27 inches across.

Digital technology has made rapid advances in recent years, so that what once would have been considered a huge TV (and very expensive) is now commonplace and relatively cheap:  This 32-inch LED TV was only $240 in a holiday special at Amazon and, because a reader purchased it by shopping through our Amazon Associates links, we got a sweet commission on that sale. In the past week, we also sold a Kitchenaid 7-cup food processor for $102.99 and an Olympus E-PM2 digital camera kit (with two lenses) for $453.99.

 

 

Of course, high-end TVs, cameras and home appliances aren’t all you can buy — they sell everything at Amazon — but I occasionally like to call attention to some of these big-dollar purchases because, of course, shameless capitalism. Nothing like commission to incentivize enthusiasm with the sales team, and the great thing is, you save money at Amazon, and my commission doesn’t cost you a cent, so it’s a complete win-win, Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” in action.

There are only 10 days left until Christmas, but Amazon usually ships within 5 days, and special two-day shipping is available, so there’s no better time to shop our Amazon links than now.

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