american's are genotypically and phenotypically any smarter or less smart than anyone else from your attorney Bernie to that Asian kid that keeps bating you on math tests. Americans don't seem stupid because they are stupid, they're undereducated and at this juncture (2015) all "news" in mass media is very very nearly 100% ads made to look like news and in nearly every case the "story" is exactly the opposite of the truth. Even one lazy reporter can do this in a national newspaper; ask me why I don't trust the Globe & Mail any more (unless I know the author or the actual facts) - the actual value of newspapers is the truthiness of its writers. A handful of real reporters are all that's left of journalism: Gilmore and Froomkin and who else exactly? Gwynne Dyer on a good day I suppose.

The problem can all be summed up by the last part of THAT speech. "We used to aspire to itelligence not belittle it. We used to be informed."

Informed. We used to be told facts so we could make our own decisions. In the two periods what this was an institutional focus, the 30s and 60s, we experienced a golden age of innovation and society advanced at warp sped and not the usual glacial pace. Nearly every appliance, machine and non-internet gadget in your house was invented in the 1930s. Tesla's mum invented the egg beater, Jeremy Clarkson's grandmother invented the canning jar and so on. All in the 30s along with commercial: electricity, cars and planes, radio and tv and the birth of the transistor which begat the electronic age which quickly gave way to the chaos and propaganda or war.

In the 1960s we launched a rocket every saturday morning in the middle of cartoons (which was fiendishly clever) and thought we'd all have jobs building the goddamn Enterprise in space until we retired at 30 to spend the rest of our 150 year lifespan browsing the worlds musume on our view screens. Instead we got Ira(q|n), Ebla, Katrina, the Gulf, Fukushima and an American political landscape PT barnum would kill for.

Here's how and why that happened.

These three Adam Curtis videos explain why we're no longer informed (but think we are)