Here are some of the headlines and recent developments you might have missed this week if you depend only on the "mainstream media" for your news --
1. We all know the government spends a lot of money on crazy spying technology, but few could have believed this: the National Reconnaissance Office of the federal government recently gifted two aging satellites to NASA, both of which reportedly offer "100 times the Hubble's field of vision."
That's right, our government's garage sale, hand-me-down garbage is 100 TIMES MORE POWERFUL than NASA's most celebrated space telescope project. And you think they can't see your license plate from space. Ha.
2. Speaking of our creepy Big Brother spy state, even several months after WIRED broke the story that the NSA is building a $2 billion data center in the desert to spy on and analyze Americans' Internet communications and phone calls, and even after a NSA whistleblower went on national television (Ok, Democracy Now is not exactly Sean Hannity in terms of viewership numbers, but still!) to disclose that his agency had intercepted 20 TRILLION or more communications between American citizens -- without a warrant... Even after all that, the story hasn't broken terribly wide, and many Americans are completely oblivious to the fact that our text messages, emails, and even Google searches are likely sitting (quite illegally, I might add) on a government spy server somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
3. Rumors of a "zombie apocalypse" reached fever pitch in the days after a Miami man unexpectedly ate the face of another human being, and after a naked U.S. cage fighter reportedly ripped the heart out of his personal trainer's body and cooked it... and after news broke that a man in Sweden flew into a rage and ate his wife's lips. The rumors reached so far and wide that the CDC confirmed to the press there is no zombie apocalypse underway.
And I think that's even more frightening, ultimately, than the possibility of a virus that causes violent insanity in its victims. You see, if there's no zombie apocalypse, it means you and I are surrounded by crazy people -- just one traffic ticket or delayed IRS refund away from going full Dexter on any of us, at any time.
Just as the ancient Roman empire reportedly fell in part due to widespread lead poisoning, perhaps there is something in our modern environment -- cell phone electromagnetic radiation, genetically modified food, the Kardashians -- that is making us all a bit "off." Historians could look back on today in shock that we didn't realize something was making us lose it.
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