EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm

It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.

As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.

All societies are consensus realities wholly dependent upon participation.

The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.

So.

Weaponized social media. That's what wasn't predicted.

Maybe the abnormal thing was the century or so we had of papers/radio/TV guided by ethics or professionalism or some delicate trustworthiness-equilibrium.

And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.

This implies that the period with massively more centralized control of information had a truer consensus reality.

That seems… unlikely?