Considering that all media is filtered through just five megacorporations (compared with 50 companies in the early 80s), not to mention (but I will) the fact that domestic propaganda was officially "approved" for use against the American people a few years ago, it's kinda hard to tell the difference between what is real and what isn't anymore.

Besides, it's all "hey look, shiny things". Pay attention to the right hand so you won't see what the left is doing.

The distractions on the "news" also serve another purpose. To fill up your short term memory like junk food for the brain. To keep you from remembering what happened last week, let alone last year. From putting these things into perspective, especially historical perspective.

We've undertaken a large-scale research project. We're six months in. I was reading "The Plutonium Files," a book on the American government's top secret medical experimentation against mostly unwitting, clueless American citizens during the Cold War. All of this stuff is on record, but many people still have no idea even half of this stuff went on.

And that's how it is with a lot of government experimentation. There's a decades-long history of it, stretching all the back to the stress tests that were done on soldiers in the first world war and really, who knows if it only started there. Doubtful.

Take the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, for example, where the government lied to about and knowingly failed to treat rural African American patients for the disease so prominent health officials who could care less about the Hippocratic Oath could see what would happen as the disease progressed (and spread). The experiment on patients who never gave informed consent and thought they were being treated for "bad blood" spanned 40 years and only ended in November 1972 because of a whistleblower. Penicillin was validated as a cure in the 40s. These medical officials essentially sentenced innocent men to slow, horrible deaths as they stood idly by and watched.

But that started in the 1930s. The real boom in experiments against the population didn't begin until World War II, when the military not only began testing truth serum and other chemical agents against its own soldiers, but the military sailed ships up the California coastline spraying bacteria on coastal towns to see how far it would spread. Some died of pneumonia. After the war ended, and the country was swathed in the national security blanket, and unwitting citizens including soldiers, prisoners, terminal cancer patients, and even children, were subjected to all manner of experiments from radiation injections to mind control.