Has the sky fallen yet? While I am not writing these tirades, I get around the Internet. The Christmas Pageant is eating up most of my time right now, but I still have the time for stand up philosophy. I seem to do a great deal of volunteer work. Should I get back to my tirade now?

Well, I was taking an online poll a little while earlier. People who understand such things know how easy it is to manipulate public opinion by stacking the deck when you write the questions. That is how I got Girdy elected last election season. Consider having to answer a question like, “ to solve world poverty, would you be willing to re-open Auschwitz?” Remember that this is a simple yes or no question.

People who read that question are most likely to have a strong reaction to the question. However, you cannot voice your concerns with a yes or no answer. The fact that the assumed result is in no way connected to the action requested cannot be considered in answering the question. If you say no, then you must be a greedy miser who wants to spread the misery of poverty around the globe. You will get far more affirmative replies to this wording than you would if you just asked the question without qualifiers since people now fear being called greedy more than they fear mere genocide.

The poll that I was responding to used loaded questions in relation to global warming. Artificial Global Warming must be obvious since people who cannot tell you what the temperature will be in 11 days are telling us with certainty what the temperature will be in 11 decades. Greenhouse emissions must be cut back from their current levels since they are now so bad that the polar caps on Mars are melting. It reminded me of the original story of Chicken Little in which the kind hearted heroism of many characters turned them into dinner for the fox who understood how serious the threat was and was a great help to the other characters. Some things are too important to think about.

So I ask again if the sky has fallen yet. It saddens me to no end that my mind is not up to any real writing at this point because this hysteria means that my mildly paranoid stories might actually sell. I would like to go through a winter in which I am not freezing in a drafty house just in case global warming does not turn this area into a tropical paradise. Such is the irony of life. Now I have to go save the dragons from being hunted into extinction by trophy hunters.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mystic Techno Cowboys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.