Oh, please, one can keep an open mind without being sucked down the rabbit hole. It's a delicate balance that seems to escape the more sensitive among us.
When one turns on cable television to a National Geographic documentary about how an agent was thrown out of a building to prevent him from exposing horrible practices the rabbit hole isn't a hole. It's just the bottom line.
That his family was paid money is enough confirmation, along with stuff like Tuskegee.
If governments want us to believe they're doing only the best they possibly can they can stop spying on us and simultaneously being outraged over "classified" e-mail. E-mail, remember, is what Wired writers and the rest of the tech press have lectured regular people about — that regular people should assume that anything they write in e-mail will be read by everyone, forever — that there's no expectation of privacy. They can stop using nationalism as an excuse, in a world of globalized finance, to keep knowledge out of our hands so they can manipulate us. Sorry, but being "embarrassed" isn't reason enough to hide what one is doing as an ostensible representative. When the Obama/Clinton administration pressures the president of Haiti to exempt Levi-Strauss and Hanes from a paltry minimum wage increase we shouldn't need Wikileaks to know that.
It's absurdly easy to convince people to pay more for things than they are worth, if this was untrue, I would not be fielding a dozen cold sales calls a day at my place of business.
Have you purchased products from spam e-mail? No? Would you ever? No?
But some do. That's not the point. It's a red herring.
Check out Smedley Butler's
"War is a Racket".
Smedley Butler said:
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn't they?
They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!
Just as soon as it becomes a national outrage for our e-mails to be stolen, sent to the NSA by Yahoo.