I hate to brag, but I called it – the massive escape from YES (and HOT, which we used in the past and was no better). Check out this story from Arutz 7:

Current customers of the HOT and YES cable and satellite TV services have been jamming the companies’ phone lines since Thursday morning, after a ruling by the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Forum that customers have a right to cancel their service for the next three weeks without having to pay a substantial cancellation fee. The fee has been waived because of the closure of the Hallmark Channel, which has decided to stop broadcasting in Israel.
It should be noted that the number of those seeking to cancel the services substantially outnumbers the customers of both services who actually watched the channel.

Looking for alternatives? Look right here and here – at my blog post and Jpost article on Saying “No” to YES!

There’s no accounting for intelligence out there, particularly among the lower intellectual classes, such as the morons that run the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel web sites of the world. Why are they so humorless – and clueless? A sense of humor (and irony) is clearly a sign of intelligence, according to many studies. Meaning that if you don’t get the ironic aspect of many ridiculous situations in life, you’re just dumb.

That’s how it is with these people – and here’s the proof:

Over the past week, an article I wrote about anti-Israel and anti-Semitic web sites has become the darling of the very same people I trashed – because I apparently “outed” one of their ilk, with whom there seems to be a dispute. I’m not all that up on cockroach politics, but apparently one group of losers is accusing senior anti-Semite Alex Jones of being a “Mossad agent” or some such thing.

What do I have to do with this? Because in this article, I exposed Jones’ “Jewish connection.” Jones, a well-known peddler of dark conspiracy theories, apparently works at a Jewish-owned radio station, from where he broadcasts his theories on a syndicated radio program. The big “revelation” is freely available on Wikipedia, which I quoted directly from: “According to Jones’ Wikipedia biography page, ‘the Alex Jones Show radio program is broadcast live from Emmis Communications’ KLBJ Radio in Austin, Texas.’”

A quick search of the Emmis corporate website indicates that the company’s CEO is Jeff Smulyan, whose biography page says that he has, among other things, been awarded with “the Jewish National Fund’s Tree of Life Award.” Further rutting around on racist websites (I won’t offend you by listing the links) indicates that Smulyan is indeed Jewish (as if with a company named “Emmis Communications” there could be any doubt!)

As Mr. Smulyan has not taken any steps to hide his Judaism and still employs Alex Jones as a radio host (4-6 PM Sundays on KLBJ-AM Talk Radio, according to the site’s schedule), I assume both he and Jones are aware of each others’ identities and background. That means that either Smulyan is an extremely liberal fellow, who so believes in freedom of speech that he’s even willing to give someone like Jones access to the airwaves (it CAN’T be because of the advertising money Jones is pulling in!), or Jones is hypocritical enough to overlook his association with the “Jew media,” satisfied to make a deal with his “devil” in order to find a home on a “legitimate” radio station (this assumes, of course, that Jones is an anti-Semite, which you have to conclude he is, judging by the company he keeps).

My entire point in the article which mentioned Jones (and a couple of other jerks, whom I’ll get to in a moment) was their hypocrisy; here Jones goes on about the (according to his ilk, clearly “Jew-run”) Trilateral Commission and the (ditto) “Jew Rockefellers” running the world – while making use of the “Jew media” to spread his poison. It’s not just hypocritical – it’s irony on the highest level!

But the brains who run the hate sites just can’t relate to irony – hence they have wrenched that paragraph out of context, using it to “prove” that Jones is actually an agent of the Jews! Idiots – that’s not what it means! It means that he is a fake, phony and fraud, just like the “Hawaiian Settler” – the guy who occupies a home in Hawaii, stealing land and resources from native Hawaiians, and from where he points fingers at “Israeli occupiers” (ironic!). And he is a fake etc. just like the “Peace in the Desert” Jew from Brooklyn, living in occupied Jerusalem posting about Israel’s “atrocities” in Gaza (super ironic!). As is, to add to the pile, the “street brother” who besides being a Jew-hating cretin, is clearly extremely stupid – the proof being that he was the one who “exposed” what I wrote about Jones, without paying attention to the context, humor or irony or of the article. No doubt he thinks “irony” is what happens when you get the wrinkles out of your clothes. Duh!

(Hint: Watch the first video for some “rational” talk from Jones, then watch the second one for some “context”).

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You know those TV shows (I’m thinking Oprah) where they tell you how much money you can save if you stop smoking? Well, I’m saving money now too – not by giving up smoking, but by giving up Big Corporate Commercial TV!

Actually, I’m not giving up TV – not by a long shot. What I am giving up is subscription digital satellite TV, better known in Israel as “YES.”

Yes, this post is about saying no to YES (the truth is I thought of that line a long time ago, but I promised to give Jameel credit. We like Jameel). YES was costing me NIS 290 a month ($77 a month in current shekels!), an astronomical price for much of what turns out to be content (upwards of 80%, I would say) I can get for FREE, using an alternative satellite decoder that subscribes to the hundreds of free to air TV stations broadcasting in the Middle East.

I’ve been investigating the idea of dumping YES for awhile, so I did quite a bit of research on alternatives – and I knew exactly what to expect with the one meter dish I had installed, aimed at two satellites, Israel’s Amos, which has the six Israeli stations and Middle East TV, and Nilesat, which carries about 600 channels. Yes, most of them are Arabic, but there are enough English language one to make getting rid of YES worth it.

Until very recently, YES and HOT (the cable provider) had you over a barrel, because it was the only way even to get Israel Channel 10 (Recently Channels 1 and 2 went digital, and now you need a terrestrial decoder even to watch those). Now, if you want to watch any TV at all, you need a terrestrial digital box, which costs a couple of hundred shekels (I think) But for not much more, you can get a satellite decoder which you can attach to your YES satellite dish connection, if you’re already a customer (when you cancel your service, YES leaves the dish in place). The YES dishes are 80 centimeters, and most people I know who do this are able to use them to get the Nilesat broadcasts. If you want to be “sure” you’ll have access to the wide range of stations on Nilesat or don’t have a YES dish, you can get a one meter dish (like I did) for a few hundred more shekels.

I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say that on Nilesat, there are about 25 English language channels – news, sports and entertainment – all broadcasting free to air. From what I’ve seen so far, the programs on the free channels are equal (if not superior) to the YES content; the Dubai MBC English language movie stations (there are three of them), for example, all have the same movies that YES was charging 40 shekels a month for customers to watch as part of the “movie package.” There hasn’t been a decent program on the YES entertainment stations (channels 12, 13, 14) for a long time, imho, but the programs on the two MBC entertainment channels, as well as Fox Series (where you can watch The Simpsons 10 times a day!), along with a couple of other light entertainment channels, more than make up for YES’s offerings.

In fact, YES can thank MBC for making me a non-customer – it just highlighted the greed of the company. As I mentioned, the MBC channels are all free to air – meaning that YES could rebroadcast them without it costing them a nickel. But even worse; the one Arabic language MBC station is part of their “premium” Arabic package! Not that I watch Arabic TV (although I have plenty of opportunity to do so now!), but if you’re going to rebroadcast one of the MBCs, why not all of them!? But of course they wouldn’t – because then you might not order their “premium” entertainment package! Why pay for what you can see for free?

The truth is, it wasn’t even the money that got us to cancel. What we really hated about YES were, believe it or not, the “promos.” At all hours of the day and night, YES would broadcast promos for the most depraved programs – running the most depraved clips from the programs! And while I wouldn’t care if they did it at night, during “adult time,” I couldn’t take how they insisted on doing it during the afternoon, between shows the kids watch! I know quite a few people who felt the same way, but I’m sure they got the same reaction I did when I called YES to complain – double-talk, accusations that I was hallucinating (true story!), and being ignored.

They just don’t care – until you call to cancel. Now, I’ve got service reps left and right begging me to stay. By the way – don’t try to quit if you have a contract (ie wait till it runs out, because it will cost you at least NIS 400 to break it!). I haven’t had a contract for awhile, so theoretically I should be able to call up and cancel immediately. No way, though; I have to wait for a “senior service person” to call me up and “confirm” that I want to cancel (no doubt I will have to endure some sales pitch). But that’s to be expected, too – they learned it at the “nickel and dime” school of making money, quite common among many Israeli companies. This way, they can keep me on the line for another week or so.

Meanwhile, I’m quite happy with my 35 or so watchable stations (supplemented, of course, by iTunes podcasts and downloaded shows – but that’s another post). I’m thinking I should get someone to back a show I might produce about How to Save Money By Cutting the Cable (or the DBS dish). I bet they won’t show it on YES, though!

I was never a good writer. Not the kind of writing that you read to get information from (that kind of writing I’m not too bad at). I mean the kind of writing where you take a pen and start jotting things down on paper. Suffice to say that when I was in seventh grade “they” sent me to the school psychologist because my handwriting was so bad.

Nowadays, except for signing checks and the like, I do all my writing via the keyboard. For me, it’s not a choice – nobody would be able to read anything I wrote on a pen and paper anyway! And now, after so many years of keyboarding, I’ve practically lost the penmanship skills I ever had anyway!

But for normal people who know what to do with pen and paper, there’s an Israeli invention that lets them digitalize what they’ve written. Pegasus Mobile Note Taker, you can take notes anywhere and on anything, and automatically have it transformed into text, editable in MS Word and the like!  Note Taker doesn’t scan your writing, but actually converts what you write into text. And while there are plenty of digital pads and pens out there that can do the same thing, the chidush here is that you can use regular paper – pads, notebooks, or wherever you take notes.

That sounds cool enough, but if you already have your laptop on the table, why would you want to take notes on a pad using a regular notebook? Seems as if it would be easier to just type directly into the computer! Ah, but Note Taker goes beyond the screen; you can connect the device not just to a computer, but to a cell device too – via Bluetooth! So, if you have a smartphone, you don’t need to shlep a laptop to meetings – just turn your phone and your Note Taker on, start writing, and your text will get recorded as a document in your cell device, for later uploading to your computer!

That in an of itself makes Note Taker extremely useful. But I thought of something even better: Besides a small piece of hardware that you connect to your pad, the system includes OCR software that automatically reads and converts your writing into onscreen text. But it works with graphics as well – so if you’re an artist who draws on paper or even canvas, you can automatically digitize your artwork while you work, with a digital copy of your canvas masterpiece on-screen. Thinking about this aspect of Note Taker’s capability, I got a good business idea for artists – professional or even aspiring:

Paint something good and get the original  of your work into an art gallery or even public institution somewhere, and then sell digital prints of your masterpiece that’s hanging in, for example, city hall! You can appeal to civic pride of town residents, who no doubt would be motivated to buy a reasonably priced copy of a work that graces one of their fine city’s prestigious institutions. Plus, if you’ve donated the original work, you get credit for your public mindedness – always a marketing plus! Set up a website promoting your work and put together an e-mail marketing campaign to reach your customers; as orders come in, you can print out your work one piece at a time, saving money on the up front investment you usually have to make in producing copies of artwork. Find a printer, make a deal on production, and you’re on your way to fame and fortune!