[techweenie]

"My discovery of the morning is that the populace is, for the most part, completely out of touch, and worse, doesn't really care about that fact. Wow."

It's sad. But at the moment, I think a lot of people are overwhelmed and retreating into safer territory.

There's a great book that deals with what we have come to call "news," but which isn't really... it's called "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and it helps explain why information of value takes second place to information of no consequence on the news.

IMHO, the really frightening fact is that when U.S. media deal with international news, they rarely talk about more than one or two countries. If you watch BBC news, for instance, they will deal with all newsworthy events wordwide. And this is typical in most other countries around the globe.