John Robb has a new essay titled "Is the Bush doctrine the right doctrine?". Given the end result of his predictions, it makes me question his actual belief in his subtitle of "No sense being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway."

Brad DeLong has a brilliant post entitled Waiting in Line: How Economists Think . It's a must read. Despite it's farcical nature, it really gives you a legitimate insite into what's both good and bad about economists' thought processes.....luckily, I tend to agree tih Brad's own take on the subject.

In an entry last night Tom Tomorrow says:

When I look back at my work over the years, there's usually a particular cartoon that sums up what I felt about the times we were going through. I have a feeling that "Outrage Overload" is going to be that cartoon for these years.

I don't doubt that he's going to be right.

In addition to the usual conservative bias of the larger media sources, it seems that there's been an approach taken by this administration which is akin to the concept that you can't keep more than 7 simultaneous thoughts in your head at the same time. If they don't do enough that's strange/wrong/weird, then media will have to have to keep focusing on that maller set, like they did with Monica and Whitewater. If, however, the administration decides to continuously act in all sorts of new and different outrageous ways, then since no one can focus on them all at once, they don't seem to be any more corrupt and incompetent than those who limit their screwups to the limit of concurrent processes.

I wonder what the typical number of stories that an average nightly newscast runs with is? If they're using that as their limit, what would the turnover in bad ideas have to be so that we don't have more than about a month to focus on any one of their stunts?

I really hope that the Safari developers get the bug fixed with their handling of "401 Authorization Required" responses. Safari only seems to send the actual Authorization header half the time, so, for example, when I'm posting to this blog, which I do from a server which requires Authorization, and MT does its set of redirects, sometimes it just gets stuck half way through...which sucks.

I always like reading Paul Krugman's columns at the NY Times, but I especially liked thie following bit from final paragraph of this week's column "A Fiscal Train Wreck":

Even though the business community is starting to get scared ? the ultra-establishment Committee for Economic Development now warns that "a fiscal crisis threatens our future standard of living" ? investors still can't believe that the leaders of the United States are acting like the rulers of a banana republic.

The scary bit is that the "Banana Republic" bit holds true for far more than just their fiscal policy.

I really should try to post more than once a week, but that whole "school" thing keeps cropping up. I managed to get really behind on it in the course of last week by instead finishing the long-awaited (by us, anyway) "Goats: the search". We'll probably publicly announce, and start linking to it tomorrow.

On the back-end it's using the really cool DBIx::FullTextSearch module, which is cool, because the text for the forums and the news was nicely in little text blocks in the database, whereas the text for the strips is about 3 tables removed from the ID for the strip itself (strip->panel->character->text). The original database was started by one of our readers, which was neat..if we could get more of them doing stuff like that it could only be good for us...and save me a lot of time too.