Talking to tadpoles

To mark the occasion of our website going live, today’s FrogBlog entry will be about something very close to our hearts: how to break the news to a tadpole that the pond is in trouble. Al Gore, the first amphibian vice-president, had his movie translated into Frog right away, knowing that we frogs (the first species to start going extinct because of global warming) were his core audience. And it’s a powerful movie, even though his lips don’t sync with the ribbits.


Now also available in polar bear and opossum.

But I’m not sure we’ve really thought through what would happen a couple years down the line. DVD copies of the movie are now lying around on most lily pads, and the tads are starting to watch them. On the one hand, our kids do need to know the truth, but you only have to watch David Dodge in the video section on our site to realize that this kind of truth can be overwhelming for kids. So what’s the solution?



For Eric Jackson — the former PayPal exec who opened World Ahead Publishing in 2005 — the answer is to simply to tell our kids it ain’t so. His first book, Help Mom! There’s Liberals Under My Bed, sold 30,000 copies. Jackson plans to release The Sky’s Not Falling! Why It’s OK to Chill About Global Warming! in September (countering the release of The Down To Earth Guide To Global Warming by Scholastic, that hotbed of Liberal brainwashing).


Eric Jackson

Jackson feels our children are being bombarded with tree-hugger propaganda: SUVs are bad. ExxonMobil is worse. Polar bears are drowning. The planet needs saving, and fast. Clearly all those climate scientists are part of some conspiracy to market Xanax to kids. Good thing we have PayPal executives to set the record straight. The author of the book is Holly Fretwell, a Montana economist and senior research fellow at a think tank that advocates capitalism as the solution to environmental problems, so when you think of Holly, naturally you think: children’s books. She and Eric are both trying to think of a way to counter all those manipulative images of polar bears looking sad while they drown. “I’m thinking we put the polar bear in a business suit,” Jackson said. “Maybe he’s taking a limo to work on Wall Street.” I’m sure we’re all looking forward to movie version — perhaps it’ll meet the high quality standard as their hit “The First Toenail”:

Sample lyrics:
The first toenail, we liberals do say,
Is the harder people work the more taxes they pay.
The more taxes they pay, the more we can spend
It’s a porkfest in DC and one with no end.

But if good old bitter partisanship and denial aren’t the answers to helping our kids face the future we’ve created for them, what is? We at How to Boil a Frog feel that conversation can start on your lily pad over a cup of warm smushed flies, but we hope it’ll grow into a global conversation where we can all say what we really think the answer starts with a conversation about how all this think and feel about global warming, and hear the truth from each other, unfiltered by politicians, news media and PayPal executives.

If you’d like to be part of that global conversation, see the link on our site to the People’s Video Project. Whether you’re a tadpole, frog, or even some other species, we want to hear your voice!