The WordPress Dashboard is a good example. WordPress has a pretty powerful and easy-to-use interface, and that goes a long way toward getting a polished-looking website up and running very quickly. But again, under the hood it's mostly PHP and PHP-generated HTML; getting a theme to do the things you want from a visual standpoint requires knowledge of CSS, too, and fiddling where you should faddle instead can break things in ugly ways if you don't know what you're doing, how the cascade works and what it does in a case-by-case basis, etc.

I mentioned entire libraries being written about these topics; I'd like to highlight one book series that really should be on everyone's shelves for these topics. The Missing Manual series of book by O'Reilly Books is really, really good, easy to understand, and very well-written. These aren't technical manuals, either; they're more textbook-meets-tutorial and they're an excellent way to get up to speed very quickly, even from a cold start.

Real investigative journalism, the kind that goes straight to the heart of seated power to uncover its machinations, is an all-consuming calling belonging to only the most righteous and morally grounded individuals. The courage and fortitude it takes to be a Glen Greenwald or Jeremy Schahill, IF Stone or Edward Murrow, George Orwell; or the tireless activists and advocates who also put themselves at great risk, such as Mother Jones and Cesar Chavez, Malcom X and Big Bill Haywood, Harvey Milk and Dorothy Day, Emma Goldman and Fred Hampton, Daniel Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, etc.

To this extent, where are all the true Christians, who in this country identify so proudly with their tribe, but who when it comes down to it lack the real moral fortitude to call out, stand up and fight against injustice and corruption, and stand with those who do? Guess it's just God's will.

I think often, especially when reminded constantly, especially now, that I'm only able to count on my fingers with some to spare the amount of true investigative journalists we can rely on, of Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings. His death haunted me. Seemed too that the PTB were intent on burying this story (which extends my thinking again - where were all the stories on Hugo Chavez's death?). Lots of folks who knew him raised many red flags. Here's one story from the New Yorker, "Who Killed Michael Hastings?"

Here's the beginning of the piece on Hastings:

At the end of his life, Michael Hastings, like many of the progressive journalists he counted among his friends, felt besieged by an overreaching government. Hastings was living in Los Angeles, and at a Beverly Hills theater in April, he took part in a panel discussion about the documentary War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Interviewed in May on The Young Turks, a talk show on Current TV, Hastings railed against the Obama administration, which “has clearly declared war on the press”; the only recourse, he said, was for the press to respond: “We declare war on you.” On May 31, he dashed off an urgent tweet: “first they came for manning. Then Assange. Then fox. Then the ap.drake and the other whistle-blowers. Any nyt reporters too.” He attended screenings of his friend Jeremy Scahill’s film Dirty Wars, which seeks to expose “the hidden truth behind America’s expanding covert wars,” and when leaks about the NSA began appearing in The Guardian, and Edward Snowden was charged with espionage, Hastings was deeply troubled by the revelations and the Justice Department’s response. On June 7, his last post for BuzzFeed, where he was a staff writer, focused on “Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans,” and at the time of his death, Hastings was working on a profile of CIA director John Brennan for Rolling Stone.

It was for Rolling Stone, where Hastings had a contract, that he’d written “The Runaway General,” the 2010 article that resulted in the cashiering of General Stanley McChrystal, America’s commander in Afghanistan, and made his name as a journalist. Mark Leibovich, in this summer’s inside-the-­Beltway big read, This Town, describes Hastings’s McChrystal piece as “the most consequential” journalism of 2010 and possibly Obama’s entire first term. But despite going after big game, Hastings tended to be nonchalant about possible repercussions. “Whenever I’d been reporting around groups of dudes whose job it was to kill people,” he said once, “one of them would usually mention that they were going to kill me.”

By the middle of June, though, Hastings, then 33, had become openly afraid. Helicopters are a common sight in the Hollywood Hills, but he had told Jordanna Thigpen, a neighbor he’d become close to, that there were more of them in the sky than usual, and he was certain they were tracking him. On Saturday the 15th, he called Matt Farwell, his writing partner, and said Farwell might be interviewed by the FBI. Farwell was unsettled. “He was being really cagey over the phone, which was odd, very odd,” Farwell says. On the 17th, Hastings e-mailed colleagues at BuzzFeed to warn them that “the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates’ ”; he was “onto a big story” and needed to go “off the rada[r] for a bit … hope to see you all soon.”

Hastings lived as he died. On the small side, with blue eyes and scruffy good looks that suggested Jude Law’s little brother, he did everything fast: chain-smoking Parliament Lights, calling and e-mailing people late at night, speaking in a jittery torrent, churning out copy. (The first, long draft of his McChrystal article was a 48-hour production.) “The dude was exhausting,” Farwell says. “He just kind of vibrated energy. He had a deep well of moral outrage and sadness that I think goes back to a lot of the hypocrisy he saw and felt.”...

After his death, there was an outpouring of grief. For all his abrasiveness, and sometimes because of it, he had endeared himself to a lot of people, and the posthumous adoration of Hastings’s colleagues was striking: Rachel Maddow attended his memorial service in Vermont; BuzzFeed established a national-security-reporting fellowship in his name; and last month, he was honored with the Norman Mailer Award for Emerging Journalist. His publisher, Blue Rider Press, recently announced that it will bring out a novel Hastings wrote some years ago, a roman-à-clef ­satire about his time working at Newsweek.

Lots to parse in the tragic story of this amazing young reporter who wasn't afraid to take on the biggest authorities.

These folks are the real lifeblood of democracy, printing things that the powerful, whether in government or private business or the oligarchs pushing the levers of both, don't want printed.

I really like Al Jazeera too, and will never forget how riveted I was to their live coverage of the Tahrir Sq Uprising and the Arab Spring. Their reporting and documentaries were par excellence, stuff that makes the MSM here look like grade-schoolers. I met a couple of people who worked for their NY office when they still had an American affiliate, at a show I played that they attended. The way they responded to my enthusiastic reaction when they revealed they worked for Al Jazeera was telling and sadly foreboding. "We don't usually get a reaction like that." I was given a card and invited to come down to see their offices. Before I knew it they were gone.

As far as I'm concerned its more important than ever to be able to identify, exalt and support the true investigative journalists. Such a large disproportionate amount of the "news" we reflexively count on is manufactured controversy, distraction, interference and omission. There are few in society who deserve our fealty more than those willing to stick their neck out for the fundamental truths being hidden by a complicit corporate media owned by corporations interested in the status quo and not equipping viewers with the information necessary to navigate a complex and nefarious world dictated by the wealthy.

I rarely watch any television news. If I'm reading you right, then it would seem that Al Jazeera America found itself having to be sensitive to their corporate advertisers. Perhaps that's why they folded their tent. They were only going to go so far in compromising their journalistic values in order to appease the paymasters.

There's a great documentary series, if you haven't already seen it. It's titled "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States" (12 episodes) which came out in 2012 -- and I'm just finding out about it. It is impressive. From the underhanded ousting of VP candidate, Henry Wallace -- who would have been president in lieu of shit for brains Truman, to the ongoing hegemony of the Empire of the United States.

started doing that shit beginning with the 'coolies' or the west coast Chinese immigrants. Even though opium was legal as an over the counter remedy, they set up China Town in San Francisco providing opium for opium dens and then busting the Chinese proprietors.