The corporate media inundates us with poll results concerning the approval ratings of the first three Estates of the Realm. But what if a completely independent poll were conducted concerning the performance of the Fourth Estate, our illustrious press. I suspect that, if it were even possible to conduct such an “independent poll,” our press would not fare well on the question of whether they are “honest brokers of information.”

Consider, for example, the recent press handling of the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. In light of this, ask yourself if Operation Mockingbird is still alive and well? Ask yourself, if you were conducting a murder investigation, would you put a man that was fired by the decedent on your investigative team? And, with that in mind, have you ever heard anyone in the main stream press question the appropriateness of having former CIA Director Allen Dulles sit on the Warren Commission?

Most people, who consider the Warren Commission Report to be a politically expedient gloss over, believe that a shadow government has operated continuously in this country from the days immediately following World War II to the present. They like to cite the Farewell Address of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a clear indicator of this moral inversion.

“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex…. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Eisenhower was certainly a man in the know. And his successor also came to know these facts all too well, even unto death. The book “JFK and the Unspeakable,” by Jim Douglass, was recently endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It cites several facts that are documented in over 100 pages of endnotes, referring to declassified government documents contained in the National Archives building in Maryland.  These documents are readily available to the public as well as members of the press.

Among the points raised by Douglass are these:

1. Eisenhower warned us of the “military-industrial complex” just before Kennedy took office
2. JFK went toe to toe with military contractor United States Steel
3. The military-industrial complex regularly pressured JFK to start all-out nuclear war
4. JFK secretly brokered a nuclear disarmament treaty with Khrushchev
5. JFK openly sided with Castro in the Cuban Revolution
6. JFK was secretly working to end the US occupation of Vietnam
7. JFK refused a plot to stage terrorist attacks on US soil to be blamed on Cuba
8. Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset
9. Oswald was on the FBI’s payroll
10. CIA assets helped Lee Harvey Oswald get work
11. Oswald was seen in Dallas with a CIA covert ops chief two months before the assassination
12. The CIA revealed their hand in killing JFK through the use of Oswald doubles
13. The Warren Commission Report was a cover-up
14. JFK’s assassination was supposed to happen in Chicago, not Dallas
15. The real shooter in Dallas was on the grassy knoll, and carried a Secret Service badge
16. CIA employee Sidney Gottlieb made Secret Service credentials

Ever since the slang “dumbing down” was first adopted in 1933 by motion picture screenplay writers, it has been used to encourage revisions of anything developed for public consumption “so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence.” We really have no one to blame but ourselves for the success of our lemming-like press, for this is no longer the land that Edmond Burke wrote of to King George when he observed:

They . . . “snuff out the approach of tyranny in every tainted brief.”

— Edmund Burke (“Conciliation with America”‘; March 22, 1775)

There are sixteen points listed above that are supported by well documented research.  Our corporate media will never bite the hand that feeds them. The only hope remaining for this country lies with an engaged citizenry dedicated to exposing every sophistry and exposing that which lies in the shadows. Are the above listed allegations as raised by Jim Douglass true? While democracy itself may end with a failure to preserve net neutrality , the obligations of citizenship, in a participatory democracy, certainly begin with discerning motivations and considering the source.

© 2013 Robert H. Kalk

Consider the Source

Consider the Source

Consider the Source

Bradford Hansen-Smith believes the simple activity of folding circles provides a rich learning experience, observations that occur within the greatest context, and discoveries that have profound meaning.

Consider the Source

Forget your smartphone, shelve the tablet, and clear your desktop for something useful. Those great looking sunglasses may be your key to Cognitive Demand. It’s not enough for Google, Microsoft, and others to be in your face. They want to be on your face!
Microsoft plans to deliver “augmented reality” – where data and illustrations overlay the actual world around you. Google Glass presently features a tiny screen you see by looking up and to the left. Is this just an ear dongle for the eye, or is it something more? The apps makers will provide the answers.
Consider the Source

Arduino project for catching my cats on the kitchen counter, while they’re up there doing food intelligence work 🙂

Arduino nano in iPod Touch box. Switch arms toy gun, Knob controls trigger distance. Opto-isolators fire toy gun.

Maxbotic ultrasonic rangefinder senses distance and determines if sonar field has been interrupted ( by cat). The gun just makes a silly little ‘p-tang’ sound and flashes a red LED in it’s barrel. The cats seem to completely ignore this 🙂

Consider the Source

You no longer have to win an election, be an elite athlete, or possess movie star looks to have power. We are entering the age of the Citizen Influencer, in which every person has a chance to get behind the velvet rope and be treated like a rock star. So says author Mark W. Schaefer in his new book Return On Influence.
It’s no secret that Facebook and Google keep running accounts of our every move, want, and desire with a cold completeness and unnerving efficiency that would shock even George Orwell. This trend of social scoring is creating new classes of haves and have-nots, social media elites and losers, frenzied attempts to crash the upper class, and deepening resentments.
Social scoring is also the centerpiece of an extraordinary marketing movement. For the first time, companies can—with growing confidence—identify, quantify, and nurture valuable word-of-mouth influencers who can uniquely drive demand for their products.
Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence. And they’re not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. They are beginning to measure online influence through extraordinarily complex algorithms tweaked daily by teams of PhD-level researchers and scientists. They’re declaring their judgments online, too, for the entire world to see.
Although being publicly rated and compared has a significant icky factor, we can’t ignore the breathtaking business opportunities. The good news is that in this new world of social influence, even the obscure, the shy, and the overlooked can become celebrities in their slice of the online world.
You too can be an Internet celebrity.
You too can earn your way into the influence class.
You too can discover the power of your own return on influence.

Where the eye is upon superfluities, either of quantity or quality, rather than bare necessities, there self-maintenance passes over toward self-gratification, and vanity-wants and pleasure-wants supersede hunger-wants.  —W. G. Sumner and A. G. Keller (1927)

Over the past 150 years, at least one Russian czar and several American entrepreneurs have devised plans for linking the continents.  William Gilpin (1813-1893), first Governor of the Territory of Colorado, proposed a rail link as early as 1849. Gilpin’s Isothermal Axis Theory is still used in the study of geopolitics. The idea at that time was to link the rail networks of the Americas, Asia and Europe.
In the late 1890s, E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad envisaged a similar concept. The Trans-Siberian Railroad had recently been completed (c. 1900; 1903). Harriman’s vision included an 800-mile rail corridor from Alaska’s Cook Inlet to Cape Prince of Wales, where a rail-ferry crossing was also planned. “The Harriman Plan” was shelved due to the advent of the Russo-Japan War of 1904-05.
In 1942, the Bering crossing was resurrected as the ‘Delano initiative’ to provide matèrial to the USA’s then allies – the Russians. A rail corridor was surveyed (not for the first time) by the Army Corps of Engineers all the way along the Rocky Mountains trench as far as the Bering Strait region.
An intermodal East-West trade corridor evolved in the interim. The rail networks of North America and Siberia are now effectively linked by the shipping lanes between Seattle and Vladivostock.
In 1992, The Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad Group (IBSTRG) was formed to revisit the notion of a fixed transport link across the strait.
Aevia — Consider the Source (Slideshow)

“The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending. But fundamentally this is the wrong model for a service provider like us, and we have looked to Europe for inspiration… I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting.”
So says Dane Jasper, Sonic.net’s CEO. American ISPs have convinced us that Internet access is expensive—getting speeds of 100Mbps will set most people back by more than $100 a month, assuming the service is even available. In Chicago, Comcast’s 105Mbps service goes for a whopping $199.95 (“premium installation” and cable modem not included). Which is why it was so refreshing to see the scrappy California ISP Sonic.net this week roll out its new 1Gbps, fiber-to-the-home service… for $69.99 a month. The price includes home phone service.
Aevia — Consider the Source