Commercial Alert

A web site after my own heart, Commercial Alert concentrates on the issue of pervasive advertising:

Our mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Although you can't really ban advertising from some places without running up against some pretty daunting free speech issues, I think it's an indictment and an embarrassment to the cause of free enterprise that it should lead to a situation where you can hardly ever escape from advertising. Free flow of information is one thing, but information that is used to extract your money from you is always inherently suspect, and it taints other kinds of information that our welfare and safety require be reliable and trustworthy.

(I just re-read that last paragraph, and I'm afraid it's so badly written I can't be sure it even makes sense. It's like program code -- all the meaning is there, but in a form the human brain can't process. Gotta work on that.)