A 24/7/365 news cycle, the internet, streaming real time video, satellite radio, social networking, and the thousands of print distribution channels from newspapers, tabloids, and magazines create a FEAR multiplier effect that acts like a giant technology steroid for bad news.  When you couple that with the reality that most media people have more time to spend on their menu choices at dinner than research and prepare a story, you understand how panic is created and perpetuated.

I think there are some accelerators of fear that you should be aware of:

1. Shallow Reporting- Modern day journalism is a strange mix of facts, opinions, erroneous cause and effect conclusions, and shoddy thinking and writing.  It's just part of being in a commoditized industry.  For the most part, journalism is a field that attracts fairly idealistic and liberal thinkers who vacillate between wanting to root out evil and 'save' the world and secretly hoping that it self destructs so they have something to write about.  An important thing here:  Facts are not trends and trends are not certainties.  Sometimes facts aren't even facts.

2. Wrong Conclusions- If I had one foot in a bucket of ice water and one foot in a bucket of hot water, on the AVERAGE, I would be comfortable.  While theoretically and mathematically true, nothing could be further from the truth.  The truth is that I'm probably equally miserable with both feet.  Whenever someone says "This looks like an irreversible and irrevocable trend...", assume that it is neither.

3. Crisis Du Jour- Crisis sells. National crisis sells well.  Global crisis sells even better.  The best way to have a crisis is to create one.  The media takes one case of Bird Fever in a remote Chinese village where people eat the birds, play with the birds, and breed the birds, and then extrapolate what a pandemic of bird fever would do to some place like Chicago.  Take the crisis with a grain of salt and then ask whether the conditions for the "crisis' are or can be duplicated around the world.  Some types of 'crisis' need warmer weather than others.  Some "crisis" need colder weather.  Some need everything 'just right" to be able to multiply.  You see the same thing happening with Global Warming and Pythons.  The experts suggest that if global warming continues then Pythons could live in up to one half of our country.  I know that's not possible because most of the snakes end up in Washington anyway.

4. Celebrities accelerate FEAR- Because celebrities are famous and because we like famous people, we tend to believe them over other folks.  So, when Britney or Jennifer or Lindsay or Scarlett do a commercial about the global ferret epidemic, we want to believe them because we like the roles they were in and trust them.  Celebrities are no more experts on anything than the news people are. They just read from different scripts.  My bet is that Britney can't spell "pandemic" much less know what it means.

5. Polls accelerate FEAR- The only polls I trust are the ones that live in Europe and then only the ones I know personally.  If I ask my aunt, cousin, Pastor, or lawyer the same question and record the answers then I've conducted a poll, haven't I?  The fact that I asked them if they thought Bison should be eaten is irrelevant.  It's too easy to draw statistically correct but realistically wrong conclusions from faulty polling.  Polls are part of the CIA, NSA, and Psyops, playbooks.  Just put poll results out that are erroneous and watch countries fall apart...or wars start when they weren't going to.

6. This could DESTROY mankind- Look, there are about a million events a year that have the potential to destroy the earth and none of them really do.  The 'destroy the earth' crowd of believers implies that the rest of us would sit by and do nothing while it happened.  The earth, the last time I looked is a pretty big place.  Even if you did manage to destroy it, that doesn't mean it won't start to regenerate. I thought Howard Dean had destroyed the Democratic Party and now it's back and according to the media, ready to take over the world.

7. Global Warming- Total, unbelievable, global SCAM designed to create a futures market for carbon offset credits and a come back platform for Al Gore.  The earth has not heated up more than one degree in the last 100 years.  Look at who's propogating this and ask how much they have to benefit from the world getting warmer.  If you truly believe the world's getting warmer move to Michigan or Minnesota.

I think you should have our own 24/7/365 news channel that starts each morning with a recitation of what worked in your life yesterday, what you anticipate will work today, and what you are working toward to make work for tomorrow.  Record the great things, transform the not so great things, and just be thankful you are on this planet and not some other one.  If I'm going to live in delusion I'm going to have the delusion that I'm happy, not that I'm miserable.