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 up with 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 ever happened.

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.