Dealing with new news

Gov. Sanford, Michael Jackson and troops out of Irak...What do they have in common? They fill the news and then they disappear from the news, as soon as all the juice has been extracted by CNN et al. As one says in French: "Un clou chasse l'autre", that is one nail drives another or more clearly: life goes on.
I have a guess that Gov. Sanford must be one rare happy person about the death of Jackson: it got him off the hook. We got hours and hours and unrequited hours on his confession and his exotic mistress, and then blink! Down to zero. Hours and hours on Jackson. They almost forgot the news from Irak.
Obviously there is no relationship between time on the news and importance of the event. It is all about the perception of how much audience you can get.

I PLEAD GUILTY too: I had completely forgotten about Al Franken. Got a breaking news alert from the New York Times and the Washington Post today telling me that he has won the election. When was the election?
Last year.
How could I forget about Al Franken so fast?

Michael's Jackson's money

Nobody has said yet what i think about Michael's untimely death. I just think: "another famous black guy who dies without a cent"
It is hard enough for each of us to spend wisely the little money we have, it is extremely hard to handle tens of millions and hundreds of millions when you have no financial education. Agatha Christie had that problem, I remember her saying that there was a moment when the money ceases to be pleasant enough to get and becomes a real hassle.
Michael Caine recently said that when he told his mother that he was earning one million pounds per film, she asked "How much is that?"

Sportsmen are supposed to have some financial education, though sometimes you wonder: I remember baseball player Ricky Henderson who framed a check of one million dollars and let it hang on his wall instead of endorsing it.

Usually it is less funny: very friendly sharks will steal the money from under your feet.
You get talented kids? Send them first to a business school.

Abortion, abortion!

1. This society is in denial: the fact is that a lot of people do not want to have children and do not like children. The women in these couples get pregnant anyways. It is awful, but it is a fact of life. You prevent abortion, the kid will suffer. Proof? (a) Despite the wonderful efforts and pressures from the anti-abortionists groups, there is a million of neglected and abused children in this country every year. If God prefers one million long-suffering victims to abortion, it is a bizarre God. (b) Every day three children are killed, a good proportion by their own parents.(c) Being pregnant is a major cause of the murder of women committed by their partner.

2. I do not understand why one would kill a doctor to defend life. The reasoning is flaky. Why not start with killing all the guys who abandon their pregnant girlfriend, and all the people who practice incest, and all the guys guilty of rape (about 200,000 a year). Then maybe the anti-abortionists could consider killing all the parents who do not pay child support. I bet we would have less abortions then.

3 The whole debate rakes of hypocrisy: we call pro-choice people who quite often think that they have no choice, and pro-life people who often do not care about the life of children, as long as they are born.

Just in case you wonder about me, I was at the opposite of the problem: found it hard to get pregnant. I would be a happy octoplet mom nowadays, if I had had the hormones for it, the money for it, and the partner for it. But I fell short on these three conditions.