• To silence the press: Six journalists shot by Israel during Gaza protests
• Psychopathic Israeli spokesman Mark Regev explains that Palestinian journalists are not journalists, but targets
• Israel bombs AFP's Gaza office for second time, 3 Palestinian reporters killed in previous attacks
• Israel to revoke all of Qatar's Al Jazeera journalists' credentials, block all broadcasts
• Palestine: Israeli soldiers arrest 24 journalists, 6 sentenced to long jail terms
• 'Shameful': Foreign Press Association files legal petition over 'violent' Israeli treatment
• UK's Jewish Labour Movement's intimidation campaign against journalists

• Two dead in Pakistan protests over the rape and murder of eight-year-old girl
• Pakistan court sentences man to death for rape and murder of 7 year old girl Zainab Ansari

• 19 questions Mark Zuckerberg didn't answer during his Senate hearing
• Zuckerberg stumbles trying to name a single Facebook competitor
• Zuckerberg struggles to answer Sasse's plea to define hate speech during senate meeting
• Ted Cruz takes Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to task
• Hardly 'friends': Mark Zuckerberg fends off senators on privacy
• Zuckerberg dodges Senate question about Facebook tracking users across the web

Perception of the truth about the real environment, especially an understanding of the human personality and its values, ceases to be a virtue during the so-called "happy" times; thoughtful doubters are decried as meddlers who cannot leave well enough alone. This, in turn, leads to an impoverishment of psychological knowledge, the capacity of differentiating the properties of human nature and personality, and the ability to mold minds creatively. The cult of power thus supplants those mental values so essential for maintaining law and order by peaceful means. A nation's enrichment or involution regarding its psychological world view could be considered an indicator of whether its future will be good or bad.

During "good" times, the search for truth becomes uncomfortable because it reveals inconvenient facts. It is better to think about easier and more pleasant things. Unconscious elimination of data which are, or appear to be, inexpedient gradually turns into habit, and then becomes a custom accepted by society at large. The problem is that any thought process based on such truncated information cannot possibly give rise to correct conclusions; it further leads to subconscious substitution of inconvenient premises by more convenient ones, thereby approaching the boundaries of psychopathy.

. . . Catastrophe waits in the wings. In such times, the capacity for logical and disciplined thought, born of necessity during difficult times, begins to fade. When communities lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism, the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale, whether individual or macrosocial, until everything reverts to "bad" times.

. . .
When a few generations' worth of "good-time" insouciance results in societal deficit regarding psychological skill and moral criticism, this paves the way for pathological plotters, snake-charmers, and even more primitive impostors to act and merge into the processes of the origination of evil. They are essential factors in its synthesis. ...

Those times which many people later recall as the "good old days" thus provide fertile soil for future tragedy because of the progressive devolution of moral, intellectual, and personality values which give rise to Rasputin-like eras.