Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.

Years ago, a student managed to put together a significant number of petitions to have a certain chemical banned. And when you hear about what this chemical can do and where it is found, you yourself might want to jump on the band wagon. To give a few examples...

• contributes to the "greenhouse effect". 
• may cause severe tissue damage. 
• is fatal if inhaled. 
• contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape. 
• accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals. 
• may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes. 
• has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients. 

Despite the danger, it is often used:

• as an industrial solvent and coolant. 
• in nuclear power plants. 
• in the production of Styrofoam. 
• as a fire retardant. 
• in many forms of cruel animal research. 
• in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical. 
• as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products. 

Yeah, pretty nasty stuff don't you think? What Nathan Zohner did back in 1997 was to stir up a massive hysteria about DiHydrogen Monoxide. Also known by its more common name of "Water". And he did it to generate research for his paper "How Gullible Are We?"

Or how about this one? Bonzai Kittens where a website was advertising ways to get kittens to grow in jars and allow themselves to be molded to fit the shape of the jar, supposedly for a life on containment in said jar.

People were do freaked out over this that even the FBI was brought in to investigate this website.

Except that the site did not actually have the materials for sale and seemed to be nothing but pictured of kittens stuffed into jars that were large enough to accommodate them. After all, anyone who has ever owned a kitten knows just how flexible the little jokers are and how their curiosity draws them into open containers like moths to the porch light.

Don't believe me? Check out "I Can Has Cheezburger" or this youtube video of a kitten getting into and out of a hamster ball all by itself. No one forced it in, it is under no stress, and once it got out, it was trying to get back in.

Guess what? It was found to be simply a case of a humor website being created (in poor taste perhaps) that got a lot of attention of people who were very much animal lovers. It was another "something" taken out of context that had people worked up.

And in both of these cases? This was before Facebook. Before Twitter. Before the internet meme and the concept of "going viral". This was just done by good old fashioned e-mail and word of mouth.

So...why am I bringing these relics of a bygone age up? Because the same thing is happening to day. The difference is that we have Social Media and Meme's and "things going Viral". People can freak out in record breaking speeds.

I already did the bit on the "Let's drug test people who are on welfare." in my last post. It hit, I saw it spread among my friends in less than 24 hours, and 24 hours after that, when I and others like me did some research and posted the $3-4.4k to one spending to savings ratio, it died down.

Flash in the pan. Here and gone.

So again, why am I bringing this up? Because now we have things flash past regarding Obama, Romney, Genetic Modified Foods, Aluminum, Silver, Zombies (thanks to the Drug Induced attacks of recent news events), 2012 being the end of the world...and far too many to recount here.

I had honestly wanted to try and create something and post it to Facebook just so I could see what would happen. But then I decided against it since it would harm whatever I was going to blast.

So I'm simply posting here. Don't take everything you read coming across Facebook as gospel truth. Anyone with a basic photo-editing software package can take an image and put text on it that can say anything. Look at the aforementioned "I Can Has Cheezburger" site for a good example of this. But anyone can do this and say that "[X] causes [Y] and should be banned!" Anyone like [X]'s competitor, someone who holds a grudge against [X], or someone who was bored and wanted to see what people would do if they said [X] was evil.

So please...take a few minutes and do some research on your own. It's not hard. Google, Wikipedia, Bing...any decent search engine in fact. So do some research and if you think there is sufficient evidence to back up the cutsy picture, then repost it...but maybe add a link to an article or two to show that you're not just spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) but are in fact pointing out a legitimate concern.

Facebook as a weapon.

There's a thing going around where people on Facebook are posting this photo around. It reads thus...

Thank you Florida, Kentucky, and Missouri, which are the first states that will require drug testing when applying for welfare. Some people are crying and calling this unconstitutional. How is this unconstitutional? It’s OK to drug test people who work for their money but not those who don’t? Repost this if you’d like this in all 50.

Yeah, sounds horrible that people are getting on welfare while on drugs. Except that they're not. Not as many as you'd think. In fact far less than you'd think.

Say...only 2 people out of a hundred tested.

Read the article and you'll see that the whole process in Florida is spending annually $178 million to save on the high side, $98,000.

Yes, in order to prevent one dollar of taxpayer's hard earned money from supporting a drug fiend, they're spending just under $3,000 to do so.

The funny thing is? If we saw a friend on ours cheering how they won a $20 from an instant, scratch off lottery ticket and we saw them spending $200 to win that...we'd think that they were idiots.

So about the title of my post. Where does that factor in? Ever hear of lobbyists? They're groups of people who get government officials to allow them to do something that their parent companies want to do. Selling drug test kits for example.

Some one brought up an interesting point. That perhaps the people pushing for a captive market to sell their drug kits are making the initial post about the welfare stuff. After all, no one wants to think that their hard earned tax dollars are being used to support crack-heads. So you post something on a fake Facebook account (not that hard to do, I know of people who have three or four accounts just to play the games) and you let it go viral. People are so adamantly against what is said in the post and so go and repost it time and time again.

Because the post is designed to push the right buttons. Hell I'll even admit to being all for it when I first heard about this in 2011. I was just as much champing at the bit to stop this horrible thing from continuing. Then I did something. Something that makes me evil in the eyes of the lobbyists. I did my homework. I thought for myself. I did research.

Very quickly I found quite a few news articles regarding the wasted money. Including the one I linked to above. And very quickly I started realizing that while I'm against my money going to support stoners who can't be arsed to put the bong down and get a job, I'm even more against huge wastes of spending. That money could be better spent on many MANY other things ranging from lessening the tax burden to education and scholarships, to stimulating the economy to create jobs in order to get people off of welfare.

And it would not be the first time that someone has used Facebook for their nefarious purposes. We see advertisers doing it, we see politicians using it to promote themselves and to put down their opponents, we see the Westboro Baptist Church doing it.

Let's face it. It's about as low cost of a form of advertising as you can get. The only money you have to pay is for the staff to do it and the internet connection that you as a business likely already have.

So before reposting something that comes across our Facebook walls and Twitter feeds...Spend a few minutes looking it up on the internet. You might be surprised to learn that what you are supposed to be against is not nearly as bad as what really goes on behind the scenes.