Today's Daily Chuck Norris Fact:
Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.
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I've been thinking recently about how people's perceptions shape everything that makes our lives secure. For example, last night, I saw an ad for an upcoming Oprah in which she grabs some "expert" on the bird flu. He says things like "This WILL happen" and "Modern medicine can't help us". Now, granted, these could just be the kind of teaser-grabber garbage soundbites that every show puts on its previews to get you to watch, but if this gentleman is like a lot of current "experts", he'll predict large amounts of gloom and doom, along with the impending end of the world at the hands of the bird flu. In the IT/infosec world, we call this "FUD", short for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Basically, FUD is any statement/study/report that makes outrageous claims using inflated statistics and, usually, a great deal of conjecture to make some event or the possibility of some event seem much worse than it actually is. We have lots of FUD in the world today, and there are lots of people using FUD for their own financial and political ends. Let's take a look at some of the FUD we're encountering every day:
1. Bird flu. No one really knows how bad it could get, it's true. However, many of those discussing it talk like it's going to suddenly become a pandemic that will wipe out a third of the world's population in one fell swoop. I would also suggest that as long as you take the same sorts of precautions against germs that you would take on a regular basis, anyway, such as washing your hands, avoiding contact with birds, staying away from those who appear ill with any sort of malady, etc., you will most likely not catch the bird flu.
2. Global warming. This one is my favorite. It's highly political, primarily as a cause celebre for numerous liberals in their endless attacks on George W. Bush, and it's further by such pseudo-scientific nonsense as the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". What makes me laugh about global warming is how so many people claim to be experts on it and say that we're going to destroy ourselves, yet our window of record keeping and research is only about 120 years long. Considering the Earth is approximately 4 billion or so years old, what makes us think that we can get the proper perspective on the Earth's climatic trends by merely looking at the last 120 years? Why doesn't any of these experts mention the fact that, according to the little we know about ice ages, we're actually just about due for another ice age? That certainly isn't global warming. While it's certainly a possibility that we're having some adverse effects on the planet, and while it's a possibility that global warming could be occurring, we really don't have the sort of relevant contextual data that would allow us to make the sorts of claims that many global warming "experts" are making.
3. George W. Bush and his "domestic spying" plans, or any sort of government surveillance of the citizenry. Another politically-motivated bit of FUD, I find it difficult to believe that the US Government would really be that interested in putting the sort of resources in place that would be necessary to monitor all of us. This is, of course, the claim of what will ultimately happen if this sort of thing is permitted to continue, as Bush slowly erodes our civil liberties, monitors our every word, mandates thought-reading implants that allow him to spot potential terrorist acts before they start, builds his own super-chair in which he can directly read any thought in your brain by jacking directly into the network...etc., etc., ad nauseum. We're up to nearly 300 million people in the country now; ol' George has quite a bit of work on his hands if he really thinks he can go that far. Besides, many of our fellow citizens seem to have forgotten that we're at war; as long as al Qaeda continues to exist in any form, as long as Islamic extremists continue to teach their followers that we're the devil incarnate and must be destroyed, we must take whatever steps are necessary to protect ourselves. Presidents have been taking steps such as we're discussing now, with warrantless wiretaps based on sufficient probable cause for monitoring citizens, for many years, especially where national security is involved. This really isn't a new thing, nor should it even be noteworthy.
Tomorrow, we'll discuss how FUD is used to manipulate people's perceptions of issues and how those perceptions translate into how resources are spread to prevent/ mitigate the perceived threats.
Thanks for reading along.
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