Hey, look who's become a regular reader of the Washington Post...

Actually I shouldn't talk - I was just perusing a piece there on my new pet topic: the Federal Reserve, the mixed signals between it and the all-powerful bond market, and the subsequent abrupt end to the home-refinancing boom. Keep an eye out for that incoming housing crash!

One more point tonight: I find it interesting that in the case of both the loss of the shuttle Columbia, and the great Northeast power blackout of 2003, we are confronted with extremely complex systems which, in the past, experienced embarassing failures. In detailed post-mortems of these failures, systemic flaws in the systems themselves, as well as their human operators, were identified and (it was claimed) fixed. Then in 2003, both systems suffered failures of almost identical nature due to almost identical causes. What do you think - are we ever gonna learn?