Opinion: Beware of unwavering optimists

As the saying goes, a pessimist is just a well-informed optimist. Russia's president is able to get any kind of information, but this is not enough: it is important how this information is processed and used. One can judge from Vladimir Putin's 3 hours and 10 minutes long press conference, where he answered 53 questions, that his mind is protected from reality by a very dense sieve which only lets through information that he anticipates. The rest is rejected or modified in such a way that it becomes unrecognisable.