Your article is brilliant, and yet I doubt anyone will listen.

Every time a claim of attribution is made — right or wrong — it becomes part of a permanent record;

The sad thing is that very few people actually care about the source of claims any more, or their truth or falsehood value. Look at this recent nomination fight — at some point about four weeks ago the Clinton campaign issued a press release saying, “Well, we asked a bunch of delegates anonymously and they said they were voting Clinton, so we won!”

Astonishingly, all the media just published this as if it were a fact. Never mind that there was no way at all to verify it; never mind that the actual vote for the candidacy wasn’t for weeks yet; the candidate herself announced that she had won, a propos of no concrete event, and everyone just nodded their head.

This happens all the time to us now — an authority figure just tells us something, provides no proof, and we’re all supposed to nod and agree. And everyone does. Indeed, if you’re at all skeptical about anything, you’re marked as a conspiracy theorist.

One more corroborative detail.

On the day that the US government announced that it had caught Bin Laden, I was very dubious about the story they were initially proposing — that Bin Laden had come out firing a weapon, using a woman as a human shield, and had consequentially been shot dead. It just seemed too much like an action movie for an old man who had been suffering kidney failure for a decade — particularly since the Administration offered us no hard evidence of any type.

An acquaintance of mine mocked me brutally for my skepticism. But that’s not the bad part — the bad part is that the Administration soon completely repudiated these initial reports (with no explanation either as to why they were so wrong); and yet my acquaintance still mocks me for not believing them even when I was shown to be right. (Which is why I avoid him…)

(Of course, the Administration has still not offered us any hard information of any type, so it could be that they’re still wrong or lying, even conceivably that the original story is right. Absent any evidence at all except, “This is what we tell you,” there’s no way to tell — we just have to trust them without any evidence at all, despite their generations-long history of mendacity. I have no particular reason to doubt the final story they settled on; but nor do I have any evidence to believe it except “they told me”.

(But I doubt strongly that that’s what my acquaintance actually meant…)