Hmm. Wall Street firms are getting the swine flu vaccine.

California parole authorities are planning to train parole officers to spot the warning signs that sex offenders may have kidnapped a girl and kept her hostage in his back yard for 18 years.

Pilots are being told not to use their laptops while flying commercial airliners filled with passengers.

There's a pattern here. Just spot it.

Greed, stupidity, lack of professionalism and personal responsibility. And they're all one and the same.

Take the Wall Streeters. Please. After killing most of our retirement plans by inventing new and innovative ways to package lousy loans that shouldn't have been made in the first place, their firms have been bailed out. By the United States. By the U.S. By us. Hat in hand they came last fall, begging that they were too big to fail and woe be it to the economy if these big financial houses collapsed entirely. Could we taxpayers please prop up a wall or two while the big financial houses rebuilt?

Oh, they've rebuilt, all right. A year later, they're getting big bonuses, which I'll grudgingly admit that, in a world where ball players are "earning" $100 million contracts for entertaining us it's probably worth paying $1 million to someone who can trash my investments and the economy.

Now they get the swine flu vaccine ahead of some poor kid on the streets of Steubenville. I guess Wall Street is not only too big to fail, but it's also too big to get sick. Or that someone in the federal government has decided (again) that the lives of people in New York financial houses are worth more than those of steel men in little towns in Ohio and West Virginia because the vaccines were sent to the big financial houses. Nobody sent them to the union hall for out-of-work Steelworkers in the Ohio Valley, did they?

The Wall Street firms didn't donate their vaccine to free clinics. They used them on their high-risk for flu employees. Nice.

OK, you say, but now fit in the California parole thing.

Government stupidity knows no bounds. Apparently, when a parole officer stops by a paroled rapist's house and sees a child who isn't the rapist's, it fails to raise proper alarms in the system. Oh, by the way, the victim of the rapist had complained he had confronted her upon his release from prison and her complaint was ignored. The answer, according to the California parole authorities, is to train their overworked case workers a bit better.

Which means there's a government failure to protect people. Doesn't matter it was in California. The tales from an apparent murder house in Cleveland prove that someone isn't keeping an eye on sex criminals in Ohio, either.

So, government has, thus far, proven it values some lives more than others.

And lastly, our friends, the Magellans of Northwest Airlines who failed to find Minneapolis because they were busy with their laptops.

While we debate around the newsroom about just what those pilots actually were doing with their laptops that it distracted them from their airplane, and numerous radio calls, for 90 minutes, one thing is clear. Personal responsibility need not apply in the cockpits of airliners anymore than anywhere else. If people who are well paid to do a job every kid dreams of doing are just griping along through life, is it any wonder that parole officers fail in their jobs when they're overworked or that Wall Street greed mongers figure they're worthy of the flu vaccine ahead of everyone else?

Government, of course, has an answer. Congress is planning to ban the use of personal electronic items in airliner cockpits.

It shouldn't have to do that. Responsible people in the cockpit would fly the plane without the added distraction.

But people aren't responsible. Government thus steps in to try to make people responsible.

Except, as the swine flu vaccine on Wall Street and parole officers who don't do their job show, it makes no difference if government gets involved. We are, after all, the government, in that it's made up of people who are greedy and irresponsible.

The solution? I turn to prayer. And laugh at irony. A lot.

(Giannamore, a resident of Toronto, is business editor of the Herald-Star. His e-mail address is pgiannmore@heraldstaronline.com.)