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While frozen into paralysis and unable to tell the public the truth about the coming cataclysms, those in government, or their associates, often leak the truth inadvertently or deliberately. Whether deliberate or apparently by accident, the outcome is the same - the public sense some body of knowledge they are not being told about, some alarm, and begins to think for themselves and to look about. There are two main reasons for such leaks:
The first reaction by the government to a significant leak is to ignore it. This works more often than not, surprisingly, as the public is watching the broad band of
information thrown at it in more ways than one. Busy with their lives, and concerned about multiple problems, the average person is flooded with more information
than they can process. A type of sceening exists, where a buzz level is watched, and only those news item that get a lot of buzz are actually listened to or absorbed.
If a news item is a curiosity, or of interest only to a few, then it gets little buzz. If a news item is significant, it gets discussed repeatedly, with experts making
commentary, and is perhaps talked about by friends and co-workers. So ignoring a leak, as the Planet X discovery announcement in 1983, often makes the issue
go away. Where, as in the case of the Planet X discovery, it does not go away, it is because follow-on leaks or a persistent group determined to get the truth out
hammers away at the issue.
The second reaction is to counter the leak, most often by a set of counter arguments laid out by supposed experts holding information the public does not have at
their disposal, and less often by discrediting the individual responsible for the leak. NASA is brought forth to proper priviledge Hubble images, bolstering their
statements, while preventing the public access to the Hubble archieves where the truth indeed lies in bold color. Discrediting the individual, creating a rash of
personal horrors supposedly committed by the individual, is more risky as this is most often a fabrication and thus at risk of being discovered as such. If the
individual backs off quietly, the discrediting often succeeds. If they argue, or persist, matters can get brutal behind the scenes until a stalemate results, the
dishonored one allowed to talk privately about the unfairness of the treatment, but the public remembering the lies and smears.
The third reaction is to dilute the impact of the leak, particularly if an inadvertent leak made by a person or group in agony. The agony of imposed silence is
understood among those in the know, and thus some sympathy exists for inadvertent leaks. Such a leak was make by Bob Dole when he announced with fervor in
1996 that the Star Wars program must be re-activated by 2003 [Note: see 2003 Date explanation], or in 2000 when the Russian government lamented about a string of
disasters anticipated to hit the country in 2003. These inadvertent leaks cause an embarrassed silence, hand over a red face, and then an attempt to dilute the
impact by the same argument pointing to different time frames or years. Unless one is looking for the pattern, and noticing the intensity of distress in the first
message that includes 2003, the pattern is unlikely to be noticed.