Daley Ponderings

Most of you who know me realize that I don't hardly pay any attention to news, and particularly since I started working from home, I can't even get my daily news reports from conversations in the common area.  So, I generally figure I don't know most of what is "going on" in the world, and I guess I adopt the old Star Island tradition of, "if the world blows up, I'll see it coming on the horizon", and not worrying about any of it.

Now that Peter has me setup on facebook rss feeds, I have the oppportunity to actually see all of the status, notes and links of my friends, where previously, I'd only see a couple of them, when I logged in once every week or two.

Today was a particularly big day for mainstream news sources being linked to from facebook, at least among my friends.  The puzzling thing to me is that apparently people (ie. lots of Americans, various politicians and the president) are surprised by the AIG bonuses.  I thought that was old news about 6 months ago.  And I thought everyone agreed back then that the bailout was a bad idea, so I was confused why we were going ahead with more bailouts.  I guess the politicians forgot to read facebook, or wherever I heard about the bonuses, as apparently, the bonuses were actually only paid a couple days ago, and caught everyone off guard.  As I understand it, the bonuses were made public a year ago, way before (at least from my non-news view) any of this was getting talked about.

I applaud ABC's recent 20/20 reports - much of it is what you'd think would be fairly obvious, but of course, that assumes common sense is common, which Voltaire said a long time ago that it isn't. I watched the "road to nowhere", which has some interesting points on private ownership of roads - I had generally thought it was a dumb idea that different places were selling their roads to businesses in foreign countries, but hadn't put that thought together with my normal thoughts on any a business can do, a government can do it worse.  The "free" (and mandatory?) pre-k video was interesting, and the outspoken pre-school teacher's comments were good, and presumably accurate.  If the medical marijuana's lawyers are telling the truth that their client always checked records and prescriptions (and presumably, they are, since the local officer wasn't able to do anything, but required federal help) then since he was abiding by the state law, I'm not exactly sure why the federal government got involved; it is the United States, after all.  At least they say they've stopped doing that in the future, ie. "we were wrong to do that, and won't do it again, but we'll just let 'bygones' be bygones and not think about all the wreckage we've created recently".  The dumbfounded looks on the supporters of the Mexican wall were pretty good - and the pictures of all of the holes and ladders show what a waste that was/is.  I hadn't heard of the lady who said it is impossible to "make it" in America today, apparently she is making big news in high schools and colleges all over the country.  I liked the college kid's response to her book (note that they both got to write a book, so are presumably both doing financially well now...).

I am also confused by the overwhelming majority of people/voters who apparently support all of this stuff.  Why am I never called for any of this?  I'm only called for dumb surveys and requests for money.  Perhaps the pollsters just call the people who will agree.

And just to round out my facebook links, the intellectual of the group linked to a St. Patrick's day short video by the Veggie Tales people.

I'll go back to not paying attention any more - it seems like it is worse than it used to be - I used to just be in the dark; now it appears that I already know the news, but the people making the decisions don't.