I spoke with the chair today about taking sabbatical next year. My position doesn't necessarily recieve a sabbatical, but the previous chair had indicated that he thought the department could support me taking a sabbatical and, so far, things are on track now. But it all depends on getting the Fulbright. The meeting left me feeling stressed out and worried and, as a consequence, I didn't get as much done today as I might have. We're in the mid-semester doldrums, where I actually have some reasonable blocks of time to get work done. I found that there were new versions of openssl, modssl, and apache, so I grabbed the source and compiled them. The server was busy enough that I decided to hold off on installing them until tomorrow morning.
There was a 
really creepy article referenced on William Gibson's blog.
[...] the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do [...]
Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. [...]
If these policies sound familiar, it’s because they are the same ones multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at once. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market. [...]
There are many in Iraq who argue that [...] Bremer’s reforms were the single largest factor leading to the rise of armed resistance.
So the key observation is that the Neocons did have a plan -- they just had a stupid plan that backfired. The real question is why the media don't bother to report on stuff like this.
A couple of weeks ago, I read this, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to write this. There are probably three people on Earth who would get the joke, but two of them are Phil and I.
Related to this, I've decided to start using a livejournal as a place to blog in Esperanto. I've been reading the Esperanto livejournal for a couple of years, but decided to finally join in.