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Just Your Standard Bull

published: January 8th 2010
by: Michael Sturgess

It appears the New Year is coming in with a vengeance. By the time you receive this issue, South and Central Texas will have seen some of the coldest temperatures seen in recent years. Al Gore—I’m having a hard time with the concept of Global Warm-ing this week! According to the National Weather Ser-vice, “new record daily lows may be established.”
    On a separate note, is it just me, or is everyone getting a lot more emails these days about topics like gun control, increased government regulations…in general, the increased loss of our personal freedoms? Maybe I’m just in the wrong email circles but it seems that the frequency of these types of emails has really exploded in the past year. It should be evident to most that this occurrence has coincided with the election of the current administration, along with the Democrats seizing the majority of both the House and Senate.
    I got one just the other day that was about how an unassuming and perhaps well meaning peace of legislation started a nation down a path where that law led to another, then to another, etc. Now, this country has gun control laws so stringent that a person, who shot and killed a thief in his own home, now serves a life sentence in prison for murder. Perhaps you haven’t seen this particular email, but I’m willing to wager that you have seen other emails just like them.
    But perhaps I shouldn’t be assuming that at all! If you have read this column in the past, you no doubt know that I am conservative by nature. It would be terribly rude of me to assume that our readership is totally conservative as well. However, I do think it would be safe to assume that many if not most conservative minded citizens out there do in fact get these emails.
    That got me to thinking. Do citizens who lean more towards the liberal side of politics, get these same emails? Are they in the same email circles that I am? Or do they get emails that are more liberal in nature? Surely they send and receive emails that stoke the fires of socialism or simply emails about how the government is better equipped to take care of us than we are ourselves. Surely, they have emails that get their juices flowing and their blood boiling for the liberal cause!
    I must tell you that I get very few emails of this nature. With the exception of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) getting my email address, I really don’t get many. In fact, I don’t even get the DNC emails anymore.
    And this occurrence really has got me to thinking. Could it be that my Anti-Virus and Spam software has blocked these emails? Could it be that the programmers who write my software are conservative by nature and simply take the more liberal propaganda, call it spam and block it from my computer? Could I be so lucky that these programmers know exactly what I want and what I do not need and they simply block it from my existence?
    These thoughts warranted my further investigation into this matter. I figured now was as good of a time as any to clean out my spam folder and start with a clean slate for the New Year. As I opened the folder, a pattern developed rather quickly before my very eyes. After about two minutes of intense study and scrutinizing I can tell you that about 8 out of every 10 emails marked as spam were for male enhancement, about 1 out of every ten were for prescription drugs like Vicodin, and 1 out of 10 were emails for replica Rolex watches.
    My study revealed no emails were blocked or marked as spam that support or favor the liberal cause. Wow! Before I go further, if you are in fact one who leans in this direction, please do not take this column as an open invitation to add me to your email list. But I certainly wouldn’t mind if you dropped me a line just to let me know whether you do or do not get emails of a liberal nature or if you get the same conservative slanted emails that I get.
    Before I close this month’s column, let me say that I truly do appreciate the spam programmers. And if by some chance I do end up in the wrong email circles, my hope is they will continue to block me from the things that I do not need!