A few months ago I was exactly like you. I didn’t care very much about politics, who voted for who, who would endorse McCain to follow him on the White House or why Obama had the way paved by a USD 5 million personal investment by Hillary Clinton.
And then, one day, I started to read the newspapers differently. The Wall Street Journal provoked me half a heart attack when I found out that Hillary Clinton planed to lower the taxes for the rich and boost the already inefficient US government spending in order to help the economy. And of course, fave the corporations who paved her way to her half try to become a president.
Barack Obama is more honest – oriented towards the poor people of USA, who had never had a chance and who were scammed into subprime by reckless companies who promissed 100,000 USD with payments back of USD 100 per month. And nobody advised those people on what they should do or how long would it take for them to pay the debts back (3 generations?). Acceptedly, when I started to read between the lines of what Obama was saying I realized that half of the mortgage mess we are facing nowadays was created with the sole purpose of ripping of the poor people – and it failed because all the poor people (or most of them) stopped spending all at once.
I am reading the news not because the hurricane hitting the Gulf of Mexico soon will raise the oil prices (and indeed it pushed it up only to $117 a barrel, a modest increase compared to the $147 from less than one quarter ago). Those news are promoted by hedging funds who subscribe to the oil transactions up to 7 times more than the real volume. And if you look at the serious economical press, such as Business Week, Forbes or the Wall Street Journal, they never gave it more than few lines. For good reasons indeed – some news are written to influence the investing decisions of the masses, as doitinvest.com has reported more than once. Some other news are made to inform and some news… well the worthy ones need some judgements from yourselves.
So what kind of news do I read? Honestly, the blunt ones. The ones saying that Nintendo has increased its sales forecasted and posted record sales for the last quarter. Which is normal since its console Wii is such a nice power tool for the gamers looking back for more than a PC-imitating console. Such as the ones that most of the Nintendo’s competitors struggle to create, forgetting that our houses have become too small to fit in one more gadget.
Simply put, “I think therefore I exist” (Descartes). And nothing can be a substitute for a brain, not even a Technorati high-ranking blog. Believe me or not.