Misinformed political ramblings

I don't pretend to know a lot about politics or the news. In fact, usually I am very uninformed. I only occasionally read up on what's going on if people keep talking, like they did with all that happened in Libya and Egypt, and then now with Joe Paterno. But today has been a day for thinking about politics in Econ and Spanish. In Economics, someone wrote one of our blog comments on a proposed tax on the producers of Christmas trees in order to pay for the advertising they were requesting from the Department of Agriculture to help raise sales. The debate was whether or not there should be this tax and also, if it was even the Department of Agriculture's place to help raise Christmas tree sales. Apparently, the dairy industry did it before, which is how the "Got milk?" campaign began. I think it makes more sense for the government to promote the sale of milk because it is promoting nutrition in a way since milk is important for strong bones, etc. But one girl commented that she didn't think it was the government's place to tell her to live a healthy life and that if she wanted to die from obesity at 50 by all means she would. And that comment just got me thinking about what is the actual role of the government. Does it merely facilitate and make sure no one kills anyone and let the market and everything else run freely? Or are there some kinds of standards that the government needs to promote? Obviously, we need some kind of structure to our lives because human nature is not perfect, but how much structure? And about what things?

On a different note in Spanish class, we were talking about the Spanish Constitution, and one of the articles says that "Everyone has the right to life" but the way it is worded in Spanish, it does not read "Todos los españoles" but rather just the word "todos" which encompasses every living thing...? It's very vague. There is no death penalty in Spain, and I am pretty sure that abortion is legal. My professor was very vague in his answer to my question about what was the view of abortion. I don't get how you can say that you value life and that is why capital punishment is immoral, yet say that a woman still has the right to choose to abort her child or not. And I don't understand how conservatives can be so adamantly "pro-life" when they are in favor of the death penalty. I am not really sure how I feel about the death penalty anymore, but it seems that both sides have their views about what is wrongly taking life mixed up.

Right now, I don't really know what I think about all of this, and I don't really know where to go to be informed because everywhere is biased.

Dear blog, thoughts swill around in my head, occasionally making their way into the lovely "drafts" section of blogger, but I don't ever seem to have any good concluding thoughts. Even now, I have a million threads, but nothing that resembles a finished idea. I think I've cultured myself to have a slight form of ADD, since I bounce from thought to thought, website to book, song to song, my mind never resonates on one thing for too long. This is a problem, an enjoyable problem because I like to have my brain constantly occupied by lots of nice thoughts. However, more often than not all I am left with our nice thoughts and no results, whatever those results may be. I think this might be a reason for my lack of motivation and focus this semester in regards to school. I strive for either mindlessness or mindfulness that is focused on twenty million different things, rather than the actual task at hand. It makes getting work done really hard. It makes it hard to sit down and write an email back to someone if it's more than just a sentence or two response. I dislike this problem, so I am going to turn off the music that I love so much, put my laundry in the dryer, and read a book for real.

Sincerely,

Someone Who Consumes More Blog Posts than Produces