I suspect that some parts of the country are seeing a good and "strong" economy, like in post-Katrina land where construction workers are probably swamped with repair jobs. Also in the military-industrial complex, the Iraq war is just one that keeps giving and giving. (Gee, I wonder who is going to be paying and paying for that one? Let the good times roll.)

The elephant in the living room has to be new homes and mortgage financing. As long as new home sales kept going up and up; meaning continued sales of appliances: refrigerators, washers, garage door openers, etc. and continued good times for construction crews and strong numbers for lumber, wall boards, etc.; then a lot of people were still content. I guess the game plan was to keep it going until right after Novemeber 2006 (US elections). But the system is already showing signs of strain and cracks in the dam.

I dread what comes next. (Le Deluge as Louis the XIV might say. Or who gives a flying f*** as Bush II might say, it ain't on my watch.)

We are inundated with so much information every day that it is often difficult to filter out the noise.

My personal case in point for straining to see the forest for the trees is related to my work in medical research.  I spent so much time studying science and medicine and  every day reading journal articles or attending seminars that I found it difficult making the time to investigate why the U.S. health care system was so dysfunctional, wasteful, and inefficient - yet I was a part of that system.  When I finally had a chance to take some courses in public health and preventive medicine and also study health care economics in some detail I began to see that the very nature of the system itself and in particular how the financial interests in the system operated was the source of dysfunction.  I understood that the cure could never come in a series of reforms of various policies or the addition of more subsidies.  IMO, the two glaring problems were a total lack of transparency and an ideology based not optimal health results but on a technophile treatment agenda (both meds and machines).

In my last position I saw a microcosm of the system Fitts describes - when the private sector begins feeding off the public sector like a tick.  My former supervisor wore various hats as VP and the Chief of Medicine of a world renowned private research hospital, a dean of the medical school, and the CEO of a biotech company.  He used his role as our director to use NIH grants to perform research on the drugs his company was developing.  The NIH grants covered salaries and capital equipment.  He had a few dozen medical scientists (MDs, PhDs, and a few MD-PhDs) working to test the drugs his company was developing.  These researchers all received their salaries via state or federal tax dollars.  Needless to say, I found the arrangement distasteful.

While my last observation may not be very commonplace in research, the general trend in medicine increasingly is corruption of medical science by monied interests to a degree not grasped by the general public or even many in the health care industry.  The FDA is no longer even remotely connected to patient safety, it is little more than an arm of Big Pharma.  Such is the evolution of the larger system.