Truth Is What We Hide, Self-Serving Cover Stories Are What We Sell

The fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion.

We can summarize the current era in one sentence: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell. Jean-Claude Juncker's famous quote captures the essence of the era: "When it becomes serious, you have to lie."

And when does it become serious? When the hidden facts of the matter might be revealed to the general public. Given the regularity of vast troves of well-hidden data being made public by whistleblowers and white-hat hackers, it's basically serious all the time now, and hence the official default everywhere is: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell.

The self-serving cover stories always tout the nobility of the elite issuing the PR: we in the Federal Reserve saved civilization by saving the Too Big To Fail Banks (barf); we in the corporate media do investigative reporting without bias (barf); we in central government only lie to protect you from unpleasant realities–it's for your own good (barf); we in the NSA, CIA and FBI only lie because it's our job to lie, and so on.

Three recent essays speak to the degradation of data and factual records in favor of self-serving cover stories and corrosive political correctness.

Why we stopped trusting elites (The Guardian)

"It’s not just that isolated individuals are unmasked as corrupt or self-interested (something that is as old as politics), but that the establishment itself starts to appear deceitful and dubious. The distinctive scandals of the 21st century are a combination of some very basic and timeless moral failings (greed and dishonesty) with technologies of exposure that expose malpractice on an unprecedented scale, and with far more dramatic results.

Perhaps the most important feature of all these revelations was that they were definitely scandals, and not merely failures: they involved deliberate efforts to defraud or mislead. Several involved sustained cover-ups, delaying the moment of truth for as long as possible.

(The selective coverage) "generated a sense of a media class who were adept at exposing others, but equally expert at concealing the truth of their own behaviours.

Several of the defining scandals of the past decade have been on a scale so vast that they exceed any individual’s responsibility. The Edward Snowden revelations of 2013, the Panama Papers leak of 2015 and the HSBC files (revealing organised tax evasion) all involved the release of tens of thousands or even millions of documents. Paper-based bureaucracies never faced threats to their legitimacy on this scale."

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-03/truth-what-we-hide-self-serving-cover-stories-are-what-we-sell

Google Won’t Answer These Questions

Google has declined to answer several questions related to an internal debate Google employees had about potentially suppressing The Daily Caller and Breitbart in the company’s search function.

The Daily Caller News Foundation sent Google a list of questions in advance of its exclusive report, which revealed the discussion about suppressing right-of-center articles as a response to President Donald Trump’s election.

Google issued a statement for that story, in which the company denied ever manipulating search results for political purposes.

Google’s statement did not answer four specific questions from TheDCNF, and a Google spokeswoman declined a follow-up request for answers to those questions, which are posted below:

Is Google aware of other instances in which employees advocated for suppressing The Daily Caller or Breitbart?

[Google engineer Scott] Byer wrote in his post: “Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years.” He seems to indicate that Google employees should take actions to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t win re-election in 2020. Is that a use of official Google communications that the company approves of?

Have other Google VPs been part of internal conversations about potentially suppressing conservative media outlets, or just [engineering vice president David] Besbris?

Previous reporting by the Wall Street Journal demonstrated that Google employees brainstormed ways to manipulate search results in response to President Trump’s travel ban. Can Google guarantee that there won’t be a third example of Google employees seeking to manipulate search functions for anti-Trump purposes?

https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/03/questions-google-conservative-search-results/

>>4141443

How's the weather in Tel Aviv???

The Psychological Origins of American Russophobia

Russophobic propaganda is just psychological manipulation used on the American public

Dr. Paul Kindlon

The main reason so many Americans buy into the anti-Russian craze is not only due to what people are told by the government and media, but by how they think and process information. For if Americans were taught how to analyze and think properly they would not fall for the blatant propaganda.

For example, we are told that the Nazis discovered the secret of repetition as a means of programming people into believing something to be true, but we are not taught why this practice is so effective.

The psychological reason behind this trick has to do with “pattern recognition”. Human beings – through evolution – have learned to identify a phenomenon as real and true because it repeats again and again and again. After a while, the mind interprets this consistent pattern as proof of truth value. In psychological terms, “schemata” are created by a layering of memories similar in nature over time so that all events associated with the phenomenon are perceived through a prism of previous repetitions. In other words, even if a certain type of behavior is different from the norm it will still be identified as belonging to the typical pattern regardless. It is literally a trick of the mind.

The American knee-jerk reaction to the recent Kerch bridge incident is a case in point. Ignoring facts, people automatically placed Russian behavior in the “aggressive” category because they have been programed by constant repetition for many years to think this way. Not having been taught this trick of the mind even educated people buy into the narrative unaware that their schemata dictate that the belief must be reinforced. All experiences regarding Russia are simply put into one box labeled “aggressive behavior”.

Another psychological cause of why Americans buy into the “Russia is aggressive” narrative is due to “confirmation bias”. For a variety of reasons many Americans demonize Russians. Part of this is due to the fact that people actually enjoy having a “bad guy” to hate. This is why outlaw cowboys and mafia gangsters are so popular in American culture. We love our “anti-heroes” as much if not more than our heroes. Putin, of course, is the prototypical “baddie”. He’s a real-life Boris from the Bullwinkle cartoon who satisfies our need to boo and hiss the proverbial bad guy.

https://russia-insider.com/en/psychological-origins-american-russophobia/ri25560