POLLSTERS & BONE RATTLING.

Pollsters have gone amok, with changes in poll numbers sliding up and down faster than the pistons in a racing car. Not even engineers at Indy or NASCAR auto racing want their cars to go that crazy fast.

However, it is happening right now with pollsters even matching the candidates running in the Republican Party nomination race for president against the one presently occupying the White House, President Barack Obama.

What makes the polls most interesting is that, generally, nobody has taken part in them or nobody knows anyone who has, but the pollsters claim that there are people, who will and who have answered their questionnaires, and therefore the figures they come out with are likely to be believable.

According to an article in Politico.com today, out of over 300 million people living in the United States, only 1,005 adults have been surveyed in a recent Post-ABC poll, and that makes it, on the average, of 0.0003 percent of the country's population.

That makes the result or the outcome to be somewhat miniscule or infinitesimal to be seriously considered as being representative of what the people are thinking at any given time.

Some of the polls do not even care to add the "margin of sampling error" in their final statistics, because they do not really know what that means.

Yet, the pollster companies will be zealous to throw those numbers out, knowing that they will be acceptable by a combined viewing and reading public, which does not comprehend what is going on around it or which will just take things for granted.

The percentage of 0.0003 must tell one that "abracadabra" is even better, and to make that worse, the Politico article goes on to say that, "They toss numbers around the way astragalomancers once tossed bones to foretell events to come. (The name comes from the Greek astragalos, meaning “knucklebone.” But you knew that.)"

Many have never seen that word, astragalomancers, before; but they know what it means now, because they will be picking up the newspaper this morning or go to a website, and there it is.

Even one can take the trouble to be a pollster for just a day and ask people what that word stands for and they will shake their heads and say they have never come across it in their lives; however, they can tell you what the pollsters are telling them now; yet, the two actions are almost the same, except that one is bone rattling and the other is gumption manipulation.

The travail of it all is that people believe these polls to be factual and they will allow them to influence their decisions; but the question is, must that be the case?

This blog has written about the topic before, once or twice, that it will behove the pollsters to conduct, at least one or two surveys in the open, like in the newspapers, with names and answers of the interviewees. Or on television (and not the one on a very particular channel, which has a well known specific agenda), only this time, by ordinary men and women from the public domain and who are not part of the pollster industry.

That can be practiced weekly, on Saturday, when people are at home; but not on Sunday, because they will be in church.

The pollsters will choose a person at random, give him or her a camera crew to go through a neighborhood asking questions that have been prepared for him or her.

The telephone calls are alright, but they do not clarify the situation as they are held in private or even in secrecy. They are almost like the astragalomancer sessions. However, ordinary folks asking the questions in plain view of their peers will be a better idea.

Many are hoping the industry will take that up, and when they do, their numbers will then be verifiable by the public at large.

Bone rattling has been over for years and it is not supposed to come back, even in its modern form.