It sure is chilly in here.  Perpetually gloomy in fact.  From where I sit, I see a world in which a large percentage of the population is anti-business and believes that government and increased government regulation is the best answer to the ordeal of their lives.

To this vocal group, life is an ordeal.  The planet is overheating due to greedy energy companies.  Their health is diminishing due to conspiratorial fast food and pharmaceutical companies. Their right to Internet access is threatened by Internet Service Providers who are not willing to lose money to deliver more high-definition pornography to them.  Their privacy - both online and off - has been sold to the highest bidder.  And their tea is cold.

These whiners and malcontents, like bacteria, thrive in the enclosed world of the blogosphere, where fresh air and logic are about as jarring as a large meteorite crashing through our planetary atmosphere.

Forget for a moment that their presumptions and facts are warped at best, downright sick at worst.  This is a wonderful time - perhaps the greatest time ever - to be alive, and a large part of that thanks rests with the very businesses that these bellyachers disdain.

Their blog posts come courtesy of the ISPs they revile.  The furnaces and air conditioners that keep them comfy are delivered via the energy companies they pummel. Those extra pounds around their waists are due to the fact that we live in a marketplace of plenty.  What they know of the world - news, music, entertainment, etc. are all provided on demand from the companies they so much enjoy pillaring. 

All of this would be laughable - a small brigade of Archie Bunkers in the 21st century - but for the fact that the mainstream media (who never could resist a good sound bite) pay these ne'er-do-wells attention and bestow upon them a veneer of credibility.

Now, the inmates run the asylum.

The mainstream media, forgetting that they are the ones who propped up these faultfinders in the first place, begin to quote them in their stories and link back to their blogs.  Opportunists in all walks of life - but especially politicians - seize upon this as evidence that more government and, in particular, their brand of government is urgently needed.

The media write about the politicians, the blogosphere writes about the media, the politicians quote the media who quote the politicians who mimic the blogosphere.  Bad enough.

But the worst of this is that the companies who are the targets of all this mythmaking themselves begin to buy into the fantasy world.  They become defensive (which is natural).  Companies know what the media say about them is often untrue, yet when snowglobers rant about a potential vendor or business partner, many companies become wary of getting too cozy with another company that has run afoul of the blogosphere.

Soon, the companies are playing by and responding to the rules of the snow globe, rather than recognizing the process for the absurd, insulated, isolated, deliberately manipulative universe that it is.

Inside the snow globe, at least for business, it is always snowy.  That is the nature of snow globes. 

That leaves businesses two very clear choices.  Play by the rules of the snowglobers and submit to their tariffs - no matter how illogical.  Or make your decisions based not upon the over-inflated views of the few and concentrate instead on the needs, opinions and wishes of the vast majority of people who pay zero attention to the snow globe.

In the outside world, where fresh air and reality are in abundance, this is -- to steal a quote from George Bailey -- a wonderful life.