The retail outlook is pretty mixed. I'm hearing it from everywhere. People are still buying presents, but not like any recent years gone by. It's just plain slow.

Still something happened last week. I paid the last of the credit installments on my fall merchandise. Debt, bad. Every current bill is paid. I've got lots of merchandise and it's all mine. So even a slow Xmas season is irrelevant. Any cash flow at all is in the green.

When they found those scuds out in the Arab sea my first thought was Gulf of Tonkin all over again. Now it turns out that Yemen is claiming the missiles being smuggled from North Korea. And Yemen are our friends, aren't they...?

Meanwhile the US changes policy and I don't think it can be good. We'll now drop nukes on rogue states if we even think they plan to deploy a mass destruction weapon. All through the cold war we resisted any such first strike clause from anybody because it screws up the detent thing. If you're stating that you'll strike first, the other side has to strike much, much harder. This leads to nasty little arms races.

Looks like about 60 people lost their jobs with the latest round of cuts at AOL west. I'll have to check with some of my former co-workers and see if they've finally decided whether that free browser division is still worth subsidizing.