Fox News is one thing, but yesterday I spent some time really wondering about people and where their heads are at via Pintrest.

I basically wandered into "conspiracy gallery central" - it was both fascinating and horrifying to say the least. Much of it was just plain bunk (lizard people?), and the rest could probably be verified as incorrect. There were a few pieces to make you go "hmm?" - but still, they were all things that if you wanted to you could research them a bit more before jumping to the pre-conceived conclusions these images suggested (most had some kind of text of "did you know that..." superimposed over them.

Examples I saw:

* Something about HAARP moving from Alaska to Australia - to continue it's mind control or whatever

* A patent from 2003 (verified as a real patent - but that don't mean anything) about using a CRT to induce changes in a person's thoughts (literally, a patent to validate tin-foil hat wearers)

* Something that seemed to purport that Hitler became Howard Hughes (maybe I got the picture wrong - it was a "side-by-side" "no-photoshopping-done" halves-matching with some other person; if you squinted just right, it kinda sorta worked. That said, I've seen people in real life walking around that looked more like Hitler (not sure why anyone would go for that look, though - he kinda ruined it, ya know?)

* Something about the USAF building tunnel cities underground; justified by a tunnel boring machine that was nuclear powered, travelled at 10 mph underground, yet could only bore 7 miles of tunnels per day (yep - complete math fail there)

* An "infographic" about how various imagery of Jesus, vs imagery of Satan - both show them giving "signs" with their hands that are the same; which way it was leaning wasn't clear, but likely toward "the bible is a lie" or something like that (found similar things about the 10 commandments, the Catholic church, recent popes, etc)

* More weird crap about Tesla and Pyramid Power than I could shake a stick at (the Alan Parson's Project had a song about this, contemporary with the whole thing in the 1970s - I guess people have failed to understand the words)

* Directed energy weapons from drones were used to start the forest fires (or at the very least, to random destroy cars, walmarts, and fast-food restaurants - for some obscure reason) in California

You get the idea. None of these individually were presented ironically; I can't say what the collector of the Pintrest board believed or didn't believe. Maybe they were just collecting weird pictures from the internet?

But there are people out there all over who really believe all of this (and probably more than a few watch Fox News; not that it means anything if they do or don't). More than one person has written about this supposed phenomena of the internet in various ways empowering these individuals, showing they are "not alone" and letting them group up, share stories, reinforce each other's beliefs, etc.

This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that more than a few of them are also in positions of power over the public (politicians, military officers, law enforcement, clergy), and use their position to influence their audience and others to pass laws and other measures that may (or do) actively harm the public in general, based on unsubstantiated conspiracy and rumors.

This problem is going to continue to grow, and I am not sure whether there is anything rational people can do about it, and/or whether any solution won't be worse than doing nothing at all...