From youtube:

Water — just a liquid or much more? Many researchers are convinced that water is capable of “memory” by storing information and retrieving it. The possible applications are innumerable: limitless retention and storage capacity and the key to discovering the origins of life on our planet. Research into water is just beginning.

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Beauty is in the heart of the beholder. — H.G. Wells

Elephant Painting

Shadow Hands

Hand Art

Kseniya Simonova – Sand Animation
(Україна має талант / Ukraine’s Got Talent)

Latte Art

3D Sidewalk Chalk Drawings

Typewriter Artist

How to paint the Mona Lisa with MS Paint

Brian Dettmer – Book Surgeon

HTML Art

Amy Shackleton – Painting Timelapse
Amy works entirely without a paintbrush.

Mountain Dew – Paintball Gun Street Art

Cymatics – Bringing Matter To Life With Sound (Part 1 of 3)

Bainbridge Island Naval Radio Station
5/14/1998 by SkewsMe.com

When Tokyo talked, Bainbridge Naval Radio Station listened.
– ‘East Wind Rain’; Bainbridge’s day in history: Dec 7, 1941, Seattle Post Intelligencer, 7 Dec 1971, 108(341).

Bainbridge Island, Washington

A vital link in the Navy’s communication system in the Pacific, [the Battle Point Naval Radio Station was] declared surplus by the Department of Defense and turned over to the General Services Administration. The 800 foot high steel transmitter tower,…some 200 feet taller than the Space Needle, reputedly once was the tallest tower in the world. The station is said to be the first point in the continental United States to receive word of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It intercepted coded Japanese radio messages during World War II.
– Charles Aweeka, 800 foot Bainbridge tower due to go down into history, The Seattle Times, 23 April 1972.

At 1:28 a.m. Dec. 7, 1941,…a Navy radio man stationed at the southern tip of Bainbridge Island near Seattle intercepted a final message from Tokyo to Japan’s ambassador in Washington, D.C. The message told the ambassador to state Japan’s final position to the U.S. by 1 p.m. Washington time. One p.m. Washington time was 7:30 a.m. at Pearl Harbor. So Bainbridge Naval Radio Station plucked from the air waves…the timetable, if not the target, for Japan’s attack.

The island…housed one of the most effective and least known…spy operations of World War II.

On Nov. 19, 1941, Bainbridge intercepted Japan’s plans for the famous “winds” code in which a weather forecast would signal the end of diplomatic relations. [From] “Building eleven” at Bainbridge,…the contents of those…dispatches…[were then] forwarded…to Washington by teletype for decoding.

The very existence of such a place as Building Eleven, a two story brick structure housing an operation called “security group” or “supplementary radio,” was and remains one of the best kept secrets of the war.

Some of Bainbridge’s undercover role was revealed by the Navy in 1946 during Congressional investigation of Pearl Harbor events. There is no apparent reason for secrecy today.

Secrecy haunts the veterans of “Station S,” the code name for Bainbridge. Over on Bainbridge,…people still say things like “loose lips sink ships.”

The Naval Radio Station was built in 1939 on the abandoned site of Fort Ward, an Army facility. The station handled communications for the 13th Naval District, broadcasting on a 50,000 watt transmitter. Station S was control center for a Pacific Coast network of radio direction finder (RDF) stations used to track both friendly and hostile craft. Bainbridge copied all of the Japanese government messages between Tokyo and San Francisco, and guarded the radiotelephone band of the same circuit for voice transmissions.

It was Bainbridge’s secret assignment, as much as the nearness of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, that led to the sudden evacuation of 225 Japanese Americans from Bainbridge on March 30, 1942. It was the first forced evacuation of its kind on the West Coast. Few knew at the time of the evacuation that the Navy on Oct. 27, 1941, translated messages sent by a Japanese agent “Sato” from Seattle to Tokyo, describing warship repairs at Bremerton.

[Some] operators at Bainbridge Dec. 6 and 7 were diverted to a strange new assignment –…somebody in Washington wanted badly to know about the wind direction. In case Japan U.S. relations were in danger, the code words would be…“east wind rain.” For Russia,…the signal was “north wind cloudy.” For Great Britain, the words were “west wind clear.” (Navy Commander Laurence F. Safford later insisted in the face of official denials that the U.S. had received all three wind code signals on Dec. 4 or 5. Japanese agents in Hawaii said they did not hear the “east wind rain” signal broadcast until two hours after Pearl Harbor was attacked.)

The message setting a 1 p.m. timetable to break off talks war completely intercepted at Bainbridge by 1:37 a.m. Relayed to Washington by teletype, the code was instantly recognized as “purple,” Japan’s toughest crytographic system. At 11:30 a.m., the message was in the hands of General George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff. At the same moment the Japanese Zeros were tearing through the sky 200 miles north of Pearl Harbor. Marshall’s last minute alert message, warning of the Japanese ultimatum due at 7:30 Hawaii time, reached Honolulu at 7:33 a.m., and even then was not immediately delivered to military commanders.

In Building Eleven, Station S, Bainbridge Island, the diplomatic circuits were still, as if dead. But there was noise, lots of it, from the Japanese Navy. In the sky over Pearl Harbor, Cmdr. Mitsuo Fuchida looked down from his high level bomber, saw that complete surprise had been achieved, and radioed the words “Tora, tora, tora.”

Years later, when the tide of war had turned…a signal from a Japanese radio man in the Kurile Islands …stopped, and suddenly, in plain language, he was sending the words: “They’re coming, they’re coming they’re coming.”
– Walter Wright, Building 11 and the fateful Japanese message, Seattle Post Intelligencer, 7 Dec 1971, 108(341), p. A17.

Jesus was a teacher, not a preacher like most
He told us what’s up, that’d he’d soon be The Ghost
When it came to forgiving as the churches will toast
He rose above all else from the valleys to coasts

Yet a soldier arrived, demanded Him heal his servant
Read carefully His words, please try be observant
Truly, He said, I’ve never seen such great faith
Sarcastically He responded to the man making wraiths

He then healed the servant like so many others
Having learned the skills early with his sisters and brothers
A lone child it would seem the tale of Jesus is told
From the preachers wanting money acting prideful and bold

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on [this] Earth
I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” and rebirth
The last will be the first and the first will be last
For in the future comes Heaven after time comes to pass

Please do me the favor and just read about Him
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John rather than from men filled with sin
As the words of the savior are so unlike spoken
It’s no wonder this world is torn apart, weeping, and broken

Preachers will say go to church while He said do stay at home
Pray in secret, Father listens, lock the doors all alone
When the hypocrites thumping Bibles say love is a sin
No wonder so many give up and throw the book in the bin

Again I must plead to you, please read His words wisely
If you’re not having dreams, premonitions, and such nightly
Then you’ve really not done His works as He tried to set forth
Try sleeping east to west rather than south to the north

When the time comes to be judged for what you have done
Did you help our children grow up or did you look out for number one?
Too many people seem not to know right from the wrong
I can’t help but shed a tear for those who’ll be receiving the prong

As an activist and content provider, I’ve copy / pasted countless articles from websites during the past decade to my websites, Yahoo Groups, MySpace, Facebook, post comments, etc. In most every instance, I’ve needed to include a link / URL back to the original article. This has usually meant manually selecting the URL from the browser’s address bar after pasting the text. But recently, I started noticing some websites automatically add the URL to the text selection and so I sought out how to do it.

I eventually found Tynt.com, an upstart company, offering their services for free that not only include the JavaScript snippet to include, but also provide statistics for the page hits. As I just set up my account, my statistics won’t be available for a number of hours, but I’m sure any analytics Tynt.com can provide will be beneficial to knowing how my content is being used.

The JavaScript snippet Tynt.com provides for adding a URL link to the copied text assumes there’s a master template to be used for all of the web pages. Luckily, when I first created my main website I created a header.js file my essays load to render features common to all pages. So after updating the file and clearing my browser cache, the Tynt.com Test feature indicated I was good to go.

But then I had my WordPress blog to consider. Luckily a few plugins for Tynt.com have already been written so I went with “Tynt.com For WordPress” that seemed the most full featured, and after duplicating my settings from the Tynt.com offical site to include the id-key I needed to extract from the code snippet, again, the Tynt.com Test feature indicated everything was working fine. It even worked for pages in one of my subdomains.

I have encountered a glitch in the Tynt.com code, though, for which I’ve sent them notice. I have an ebook that uses #name links to quickly jump to that chapter. Tynt.com adds a #id analytic tag to the end of the URL which apparently renders both # tags useless. Hopefully Tynt.com finds a workaround for this conflict, even if it means convincing browser developers to be smarter about them too… as they eventually did for [ target="_BLANK" ] anchor tags to open a new tab rather than new browser instance.

So now that my essays and blog are set up to include not only a link back to the original article as well as include one to my http://facebook.com/SkewsMeScience page when someone shares my material, I’m waiting in anticipation to see just what *is* getting shared.

by Kevin Crosby
with contributions from Hitch Hiker
1/31/11

Do you wear a leash to work? I know many of you do as part of your uniform they call a suit, in colors like black and blue. With a noose wrapped tightly around your neck cutting off blood into your brain, it seems you sunk into the love of money which makes so many of you insane.

Once upon a time ago a hat came with the kit — a bowler, fedora, or whatever — it was the suits that saw them fit. Now when I was working at a high tech firm watching suits come and go after a crap, I never did once see them wash their hands when shaking them is matter of fact.

It really does disgust me this ever-flowing love of cash, the power tripping folks insulting us as Liberal when world peace is where it’s at. If you can actually understand this rant with that silk tied round your neck, then praise the lord bejeebus for all the social satire Simpsons cracks.

And curse society for want of females to don their clown-gear makeup, red lips, and big shoes. No wonder so many spend all their time primping before they hit the booze.

To schmooze they tell us to network plenty for it’s who we know not what’s in our head. They insist one has experience, but not too much or your résumé won’t be read.

Since my earliest memories from childhood, I’ve been standing up for human rights (as opposed to personal freedoms).

I think I couldn’t have been more than four years old when my mom ran crying into their bedroom with blood pouring down her face after my dad punched her. I told him if he ever did that again, I would kill him. Of course he didn’t believe me and asked how I might go about it. After I gave him a long list of methods including stabbing him through the eye with a kitchen knife while he slept to mixing the chemicals under the sink into his food, I don’t think he ever hit her again… though I think he may have pushed her down the steps one night years later.

I remember clearly the day on my Big Wheel running away to stop at a semi-truck pulled to the side of the road. The trucker asked where I was going and convinced me the world was far more dangerous than it was at home and to go back.

Recently my brother told me how I used to ride my Big Wheel down our hill into heavy cross traffic and how after we moved they blocked off that intersection from the hill. That reminded me how back then I asked my dad to buy me a watch, and then made him buy me a second one when the first one didn’t have a second hand. I had timed the light down the street out of view and resulting traffic flow so that I’d actually zoom across the intersection just as the rearmost cars cleared it.

At our next house I started kindergarten to be immediately advanced to first grade, which absolutely pissed off all of my friends. When the teacher then asked why I wasn’t doing my homework and me telling her how when I got home from school I was given something to drink and then waking up the next morning, I suddenly met the acquaintance of disgruntled CIA agents disgusted with how the CIA’s MKULTRA was doing things like brainwashing children. This was around 1975, two years before the Senate Hearings investigating MKULTRA.

Back then my dad made nuclear missiles for a government subcontractor in California, and after the agents took me to meet his boss, his boss was told to tell my dad that there was a job opening in Pennsylvania and insist we drive there and explore the countryside along the way. My family rented a big car with power windows (new in those days), and we set off East.

We got intercepted in Nevada, and while during this time I have no idea what was happening to my family, I was shown advanced technologies including an optical computer that could morph in real time that I was told processed one million bits of information at once. It was there I was told that I would have to learn to keep a sharp eye out and keen ear open to the world around me if I was to be an effective spy. So I asked, “Can’t you just put a camera in my head?” After a moment’s expression of confusion on the agent’s face, he ran off all ecstatic and the next thing I knew I don’t know how many hours later, I was rushed out a back door into a van while a group of government reporters were interviewing a man across the way as being the first person to have this technology installed.

Again, this was around 1975, a decade after The New York Times ran a front page article about Jose Delgado’s remote-controlled animals including monkeys.

The next thing I remember was waking up in our rented car to read the sign Welcome to Pennsylvania, finding the motel, my parents going off to a dinner interview while my brother and sister were in a different room, and out of boredom decided to start reading The Bible in the drawer. Then some men came into the room, and again, things went black before coming to be shown even more classified information that will remain classified information.

My family spent a some time in the area and took me to see the Smithsonian Museum among other attractions, and the next thing I knew I woke up in the car in the middle of the desert driving through the most amazing lightning and thunderstorm, before again getting drugged out to end up at a “summer camp” being run by the CIA MKULTRA program, but that information will have to wait for another time.

For the next several years, my family bounced from house to house spying on child abuse rings around Corona, California. At one apartment complex where the deviant children did things like set lethal traps, one of which came millimeters from killing me when it stabbed me in the back of my throat, I found one day there dumpster diving dozens of cryptic medical records listing dosages along with dozens of used syringes.

By the beginning of what should’ve been my 4th grade year (this after skipping kindergarten) we moved north to Edmonds, WA. I remember sitting as high as I could in the top of a tree in our front yard watching kids come home from school only to be informed how the school year had already started. At that point, I actually had to convince my parents to register me for classes where they then held me back to 3rd grade again because I’d missed so much school moving around, but I was immediately bused off to another school during part of the day that was teaching advanced students. I had a lot of fun learning their creative thinking curriculum until one day I discovered they’d just given a boy a bath in the back room. I reported it to my teacher at the regular school, and shortly after I got home after classes, my parents arrived home early from work, said pack your bags, we’re moving tonight. And again, off to another safehouse to hide out.

As an outspoken children’s rights advocate, I’ve obviously made many enemies from those who would prefer children be considered private property with no rights. At the same time I’ve made some very powerful allies in government. So when someone tells me I’m their enemy, I prefer to ask the reason why before I list the people I know hate me.

Mind over Matter

See here for full text.

Two of the most robust areas of scientific research are telepathy and telekinesis (mind over matter). In the first, a “sender” tries to connect with a “receiver,” though they are isolated from each other.[19] A sender may try to alternately calm and excite a receiver at random intervals, simply via his thoughts and own state of being; the receiver’s skin conductance and galvanic skin response (indications of arousal) are measured. Studies repeatedly demonstrate significant results.[20]

Mind over matter emerges as the most electrifying area of research. It seems that human intention can influence machines – even at a distance, when no influence seems possible. Researchers are both enthralled and puzzled by the data, which makes no sense. Studies thus far have examined machines that randomly produce positive or negative electrical pulses, or measure random radioactive decay, or randomly generate numbers. By concentrating, subjects try to influence the machines in one direction or another. After more than 14 million trials, Jahn has found a constant, significant influence of humans on the performance of machines, and the odds of this happening are 1 in 5,000. Other studies have shown that people can influence not only the random generator they are concentrating on, but hidden generators they don’t even know about.

The actual shift is small, but to understand it requires a stunning leap of perspective. Something is at work here that indicates our world may be far more fluid and interconnected than we ever imagined. Inspired by Jahn’s research, Radin tested five different random generators on October 4, 1995, the day the O. J. Simpson verdict was delivered. At 10 a.m. Pacific time, when 44 million Americans were tuned in to television and radio, the random generators all became significantly less random. The shift lasted for 50 seconds. Radin believes that “the movement of mind does affect matter. It influences everything you can imagine, including mind itself. If 44 million minds are focuses on one thing, that coherence spreads out, and influences even machines.”

Other researchers have tried to find flaws in the studies. “We’ve wondered if influence varies with distance, or with data rate, or with the voltage of the machine,” says physicist Michael Ibison, Ph.D., a visiting scholar at PEAR. “It doesn’t.” So, says Ibison, you start musing on the mysteries of quantum physics, where mind and matter don’t seem so separate and divided. “When cooled to zero degrees Kelvin,” he says, “matter exhibits very weird behavior at great distances, as if the whole system is a single, unified, unbroken, organic thing, and instantaneous changes are visible everywhere. But that’s still just a metaphor. All we really know is that what you are thinking now can actually be correlated with what is happening over there in a machine.”[21]

In January 1994, the Psychological Bulletin published a review of mental telepathy research spanning 20 years. The research not only shows significant proof that telepathy exists, but also reveals surprising connections between artists and psychic abilities. Daryl J. Bem, professor of psychology at Cornell University, co-authored the article with the late University of Edinburgh parapsychologist Charles Honorton. Honorton, who died in November 1992, conducted most of the experiments. “Taken with earlier studies, the probability that the results could have occurred by chance is less than one in a billion,” says Bem, who was deeply impressed with Honorton’s safeguards against flaws and cheating.[22] [They] argue that they have indeed found “replicable evidence” for “anomalous information transfer.”[23]

The studies used the ganzfeld (German for total field) technique that works to block noise and other distractions from the senses.[24] The ganzfeld studies, conducted at Honorton’s Psychophysical Research Lab in Princeton, New Jersey, consisted of 11 experiments, with 240 receivers tested in 354 sessions.[25] Six out of eight music students judged targets successfully, although their reported imagery was not as detailed as the drama students’. Four out of ten drama students correctly identifed their target, describing the imagery so vividly anyone could choose the correct target.[26]

Even the CIA came out of the closet…[in 1995] with its abashed confession that the government agency had spent $20 million on psychic research in the last two decades.[27] It was in 1973 that the Central Intelligence Agency began looking into the business of psychic phenomena.[28] The studies the CIA sponsored were conducted first at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, and later at the nearby, privately owned Science Applications International Corporation.[29]

“The CIA studies were conducted in a number of ways,” says Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California at Davis who participated in some of the experiments, “but all the research had the same objective: to determine how well volunteers could perform in a sensory experiment in which something besides their usual senses was being studied.” [30] “Over the first 15 years of the 20-year study,” she says, “154 separate experiments were conducted consisting of 26,000 trials. During those experiments,…the statistical significance figure was a mere .00000000000000000001 [(p << 0.05)] – meaning that you would expect to see those results only once in 1020 tries if the outcome was due solely to chance.”[31] “The studies lead to the conclusion that psychic abilities exist.”[32]

The studies she analyzed…were conducted according to the most rigid of scientific methods: the trials were usually double-blind, with neither the experimenter nor the subject knowing what image had been selected; the subjects were unknown to the experimenters before the studies began; and when the experimenters chose volunteers, they sometimes went out of their way to select the least psychically inclined ones as possible.

“During one set of trials early in the study,” Utts says, “we were looking for Stanford employees who might want to serve as subjects, and we learned that one particularly skeptical man had been telling his colleagues what nonsense our work was. After testing, we decided he’d be perfect for our needs, and as it turned out he was. On one trial, he described seeing a target image that resembled a tree, but one that was almost entirely gray and mushroom-shaped at the top. The image we had selected for him was a videotape of a nuclear explosion.”[33]

After being tapped for the CIA’s psychic espionage program – now known as Star Gate – [David Morehouse] spent eight months, eight hours a day, being trained in the practice known as “remote viewing,” by which individuals are taught to…access people…remote from them.[34] A typical assignment, says Morehouse, was to access the mind of an enemy test pilot in order to get detailed information about fighter planes.[35] The information was correlated with other surveillance programs.[36] If the same extrasensory sleuthing could be used to locate…missile bases near Moscow or troop movements in China, the United States could gain a[n]…advantage in the global intelligence game.[37]

Though the CIA claims it has abandoned the program because of lack of success, Morehouse and his remote viewing colleagues believe Star Gate is as active as ever but has gone further undercover. They also believe the government is taking this technique into the realm of weaponry, training individuals in “remote influence” – accessing another human mind to inflict harm on it.[38]

Cradle-to-Grave

See here for full text.

Adopting new behaviors was addressed in 1953 by Howard Becker in “On Becoming a Marihuana User” for the American Journal of Sociology:

That the presence of a given kind of behavior is the result of a sequence of social experiences during which the person acquires a conception of the meaning of the behavior, and perceptions and judgments of objects and situations, all of which make the activity possible and desirable. Thus, the motivation or disposition to engage in the activity is built up in the course of learning to engage in it and does not antedate this learning process. For such a view it is not necessary to identify those “traits” which “cause” the behavior. Instead, the problem becomes one of describing the set of changes in the person’s conception of the activity and of the experience it provides him.¹

The proficient use of social and psychological cues is crucial to grab an audience’s attention amongst the hundreds if not thousands of advertisements the average American is bombarded with every day.² “Every waking moment of our lives, we swim in an ocean of advertising, all of it telling us the same thing: consume, consume. And then consume some more,” writes Morgan Spurlock, the investigator behind the documentary “Super Size Me” in his article “The Truth about McDonald’s and Children.” The article notes:

Today, corporations spend more than $15bn every year on marketing, advertising and promotions meant to program American children to consume.… Why? Because they realize that children not only have more expendable income of their own, but they influence how their parents spend their hard-earned bucks, too – to the tune of more than $600bn a year.…

McDonald’s and the other fast-food chains make no secret of the fact that kids are their primary targets. “We have living proof of the long-lasting quality of early brand loyalties in the cradle-to-grave marketing at McDonald’s, and how well it works,” James McNeal, a well-known children’s marketing guru and the author of Kids As Customers, has said. “We start taking children in for their first and second birthdays, and on and on, and eventually they have a great deal of preference for that brand. Children can carry that with them through a lifetime.” ³

Medial mogul Disney has gone even further by targeting maternity wards at hospitals. “The reps are offering new moms, within hours of giving birth, a free Disney Cuddly Bodysuit for their babies if they sign up for e-mail alerts from DisneyBaby.com,” reports NPR:

The idea is to encourage mothers to infuse their infants with brand loyalty as if it is mother’s milk.… Getting an expectant mom thinking about her family’s first theme-park visit while her child was in the womb, an exec told the [The New York Times], would be like hitting “a home run.”…

The Advertising Educational Foundation already hails infants 1 year and under as… “a more informed, influential and compelling audience than ever before.” Children as young as 12 months, the foundation adds, can recognize brands and are “strongly influenced” by advertising and marketing. Like that’s a good thing.

The truth is, some studies show that children under 8 years old can’t distinguish between ads and entertainment. Until then, they don’t fully comprehend that advertising is trying to sell them something. That gives marketers an unfair – not to mention predatory – advantage over our kids. No wonder so many other countries have tight restrictions on marketing to children under age 12.⁴

“Studies over the years have demonstrated that many people, especially young people, unquestioningly accept the reality presented by television,” notes the MindControlInAmerica.com website. “Popular culture (movies, television and music) carries messages about how society works and how people should behave.” ⁵

“Brand loyalty is hard to break for some,” writes David Butler for the Northern Colorado Beer Examiner. “The beers you started drinking when you were a young adult often become the beverage of choice later in life.… For some, it becomes part of their identity.” ⁶

According to the aysymtomatic.net website in their “Brand Addiction” article:

The big corporations aren’t worried about brand addiction to brands that aren’t their own. For example, Budweiser doesn’t care that you are brand-addicted to Miller, even though they have beer that is comparatively identical in its flavor similarity to water. They’re just biding their time until they strike the right nerve with their advertising and you suddenly switch brand loyalty. Until then, they have their own brand-addicts that they need not advertise to. It’s a big game to them.⁷

According to a 1990 paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association:

A study examined whether billboard advertising of tobacco and alcohol products is differentially targeted toward White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic neighborhoods.… The study suggests that the modeling of social cues can serve to motivate product use, disinhibit behavioral restraints, and reinforce existing habits.… Furthermore, the analyses of the content of the billboards revealed that alcohol and cigarette advertisements use social modeling cues such as anticipated rewards, attractive models, and similarity.^{8, i}

ⁱ The magazine Advertising Age cited Ronald McDonald as No 2 on its list of top 10 advertising icons of the 20th century. Who was No 1? It was the Marlboro Man.
– Morgan Spurlock, “The Truth about McDonald’s and Children,” Independent/UK, 22 May 2005, at CommonDreams.org, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0522-20.htm (retrieved: 13 May 2011).

¹ Howard Becker, “On Becoming A Marihuana User,” American Journal of Sociology, 1953, pp. 235-242, in George S. Bridges, Deviant Behavior: An Anthology of Readings (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994), p. 51.

² Google Answers: American advertising in the media, at http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=56750 (retrieved: 3 January 2011).

³ Morgan Spurlock, “The Truth about McDonald’s and Children,” Independent/UK, 22 May 2005, at CommonDreams.org, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0522-20.htm (retrieved: 13 May 2011).

⁴ Peggy Orenstein, “Dodging Disney in the Delivery Room,” NPR.org, 9 February 2011, at http://www.npr.org/2011/02/10/133627064/dodging-disney-in-the-delivery-room (retrieved: 13 May 2011).

⁵ “Your thoughts may not always be your own!” MindControlInAmerica.com, at http://www.mindcontrolinamerica.com/mind_ctrl.htm (retrieved: 3 January 2011).

⁶ David Butler, “The reasons we drink beer,” Northern Colorado Beer Examiner, 8 July 2008, at http://www.examiner.com/beer-in-denver/the-reasons-we-drink-beer (retrieved: 13 May 2011).

⁷ “Brand Addiction,” Asymptomatic, 18 February 2005, at http://asymptomatic.net/2005/02/18/1361/brand-addiction (retrieved: 13 May 2011).

⁸ “Alcohol and Cigarette Advertising on Billboards: Targeting with Social Cues,” abstract, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (40th, Dublin, Ireland, June 24-28, 1990), at http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED321323&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED321323 (retrieved: 4 January 2011).

Dumbed Down

See here for full text.

One means of bringing about thought reform is by “dumbing down” the population so it has less experience from which to draw. Throughout the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, “the reading level of textbooks…dropped by two grade levels. That is, what used to be third-grade material is now fifth-grade material,” writes Nancy Montgomery in her 1996 article “Dumbed-down texts too easy, too simple, too boring, critics say” for The Seattle Times newspaper.1

According to the ProLiteracy website, “In the U.S., 30 million people over age 16 – 14 percent of the country’s adult population – don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level or fill out a job application.” 2 They also reported that the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey discovered that up to 51 percent of American adults “lack a sufficient foundation of basic skills to function successfully in our society.” 3 A 2002 Seattle Times article entitled “What we don’t know about science could fill books” reported the National Science Foundation discovering “that only about a third of adults showed a good understanding of the scientific process.” 4

Carl Sagan, whose television series “Cosmos” popularized science, “knew that if we were to have even a little bit of democracy in this society, as many of us as possible should understand the workings, language, values and methods of science and technology so that we can’t be so easily manipulated.” 5

Jim Keith writes in Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness that “since the advent of ‘progressive education’ schools have not been intended to educate, but simply to regiment.… [Public school] does not challenge children to learn or to think creatively, but instead indoctrinates them to conform to their prison-like surroundings.” 6 Today’s schools are producing young adults primed to follow orders rather than think critically. According to Alvin Toffler in his landmark 1970 book Future Shock, “nothing could be better calculated to produce people uncertain of their goals, people incapable of effective decision-making under conditions of overchoice.” 7

“Who benefits when the great mass of people becomes complaisant, unable to think, unable to entertain themselves, and interested only in possessions?” asks Heidi Stevenson in “So-Called Education Intentionally Dumbs Down Americans” for Natural News Network. “The answer is simple: corporations. When the mass of children are forced to go through a system that destroys creativity and rewards group-think, they are prepared to fill their predestined roles in a lockstep workforce and unthinking consumption corps.” The article continues:

In 1918, Alexander Inglis, for whom a Harvard lecture hall was named, published the definitive book, Principles of Secondary Education, which defines modern schooling. He specifically stated that its purpose is to support a command economy and society. This book describes modern “education’s” design.… According to Inglis, there are six functions filled by the new mandatory “education” system:

1. Adjustive: Creating reflexive, fixed responses, as opposed to creative thinking.

2. Integrative: Making children conform, making them be predictable and easy to manipulate in a large labor force.

3. Diagnosis and Direction: Schools are intended to identify and enforce each child’s role in society and the labor force.

4. Differentiation: Once diagnosed, children are trained as far as their role in labor has been determined.

5. Selection: Children are tagged with punishments, poor grades, poor classroom placement, and any other humiliation that can be thought of. The purpose is to separate out those the system determines to be unfit and allow them to be treated as inferiors by the rest.

6. Preparation (called propaedeutic by Inglis): Those few deemed to be leaders, often only by their birth, are taught to be the controllers of the masses described in the other five functions.8

The average IQ is considered to be 100 for a target population. Given that education has been dumbed down by several grade levels since World War Two, today’s average 100 IQ would have been much lower in previous generations. “Technology is changing the world to such a large extent that many children know how to use a computer or a smartphone but cannot ride a bike, swim, make breakfast or even tie their own shoelaces,” reports the TechEYE.net website referring to the internet security firm AVG study which “surveyed 2,200 mothers of children under five who had internet access as part of the Digital Diaries series of studies, highlighting how exposed children are to technology.” The article continues:

It was revealed that 58 percent of the children in the two to five year old bracket had mastered how to play a basic computer game, with the figure jumping to 70 percent for children in the UK and France, showing the prevalence of video games for toddlers.

Even in the two to three year old bracket nearly half, 44 percent, were able to play a computer game. In comparison, only 43 percent of the same age knew how to ride a bike, one of the first skills learned in childhood.

19 percent of children aged two to five are smart enough to use a smartphone, but only nine percent of the same age group can tie their shoelaces, one of the most basic life skills we’re thought. 21 percent of four to five year olds knew how to use a smartphone app, while 17 percent of two to three olds had the same skill, showing that children are being exposed to technology at an even younger age.

The report also found that there is very little gender divide in terms of technology skills, with 58 percent of boys knowing how to play a computer game, compared to 59 percent of girls. Likewise, 28 percent of boys could make a mobile phone call, compared to 29 percent of girls.

25 percent of young children could open a web browser, but only 20 percent could swim unaided, so parents may need to keep an eye on their youngsters on the PC just as much as in the pool.

Older mothers were seen as better at teaching life skills, with 40 percent of over 35s teaching their toddlers how to write their own name, compared to only 35 percent of mothers under 35. Let’s hope they’re teaching them to value their family more than social networking at least, since a previous study revealed that Facebook and the like was more important.

More European young children had technology skills than US children, with 44 percent of children in Italy able to make a mobile phone call, compared to 25 percent in the US. 70 percent of children in the UK could play a computer game, compared to 61 percent in the US, and 78 percent of kids in France could use a mouse, compared to 67 percent in the US.

AVG said that parents need to take these findings into consideration, because with children using technology at a younger age it means parents need to teach them computer and online safety earlier than previously expected. They might want to teach them how to tie their shoelaces while they’re at it.9