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The Big Picture is honored to have been added recently to the blogrolls of these weblogs:
Air Force Blog
IlliGAL Blogging
Iowa Geek
Life is Peaceful
Milblog
Peaceful Chaos
PeteFredBob
Right Thoughts
The Passing Parade
To the owners of these sites: thank you!
This week marks the 2-year blogoversary of The Big Picture weblog. This chart shows the evolution of the site:
Interesting, isn’t it? There’s a steady climb, punctuated by high-traffic days. Most of those high-traffic days, as the chart shows, are Instalanches. Many appear to have brought in new regular readers, since site traffic usually stays higher after a peak than it was before it.
So here’s a big shout-out and thank-you to Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit. His great site and generosity in linking to other blogs are surely among the biggest, if not the biggest, contributions by an individual to the success of the blogosphere.
I notice that the recent Instalanches include far more visits than the older ones. I have no idea what the explanation of that is. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please leave a comment.
Why is blogging so much fun? My whole life I’ve had tons of opinions and views and what seemed to me to be fairly original thoughts on what was going on in the world, and I never got to tell them to enough people. How many conversations can a person bring thoughts like these into, before a few days go by and the whole subject has changed, and there are new things to talk about? Via blogging, I feel like I can make a contribution to the public debate.
One of my prouder moments associated with this site became the occasion of an early Instalanche. By now, we’ve all heard the argument that, the Left doesn’t like what we’re doing to fight terrorists; okay—what’s their plan? As far as I know, I was the first one to make that point.
Recently I moved to a new URL, this being one which people can actually pronounce. The old one was luxeword.com, and the new one is bigpicweblog.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to this site, if you haven’t already. Last month I also moved the site to a new server at LunarPages, and redesigned parts of the site, so it loads much faster than before.
I’d like to extend thanks as well to the commenters. Some of the best content on the site is in the comments.
Finally, thanks so much to the readers here. I really appreciate your stopping by.
...Greenspan issued a fresh call to Congress to move promptly to put Social Security on firm financial footing, warning that doing nothing would lead to massive budget deficits and cause the “economy to stagnate or worse.”
The looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers will put a huge strain on the Depression-era retirement program and aggravate the country’s already bloated budget deficits, he said.
“Unless the trend is reversed, at some point these deficits would cause the economy to stagnate or worse,” Greenspan said.
The Fed chief again endorsed a key part of President Bush’s Social Security overhaul – to create private investment accounts – and said officials must proceed slowly in setting them up. But Greenspan also said that Congress must move ahead quickly to do other things to fix the retirement program’s financing problems.
Congress will need to consider possible benefit cuts and higher tax rates before the baby boomers begin retiring, Greenspan suggested.
But he cautioned that “closing the gap solely with rising tax rates would be problematic” because the high level of taxation that would be required could by itself “severely inhibit economic growth.”
Because “benefit cuts will almost surely be at least part of the solution,” Greenspan said it is imperative for Congress to let future retirees know as soon as possible that all currently promised benefits won’t be forthcoming when they retire.
As my friend Matt pointed out, Social Security is the first thing he can remember Democrats claiming the government was doing right, since GWB took office. Liberals claim that everything that happens is going terribly wrong and it’s all the fault of GWB—but suddenly, they claim, Social Security is perfect.
If you had difficulty accessing this site today or yesterday, it’s because forwarding from the old URL (luxeword.com) to the current one (bigpicweblog.com) was temporarily disabled. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feed links to the latest ones for this site. Thanks!
Until now gMail, Google’s cool email system, was available on an invitation-only basis. Today gMail is out of beta, and is available to all without an invitation.
Update 3-19-05: I guess that was only a temporary move by Google to bring in a large number of new gMail users—the link is off the Google home page at the current time.
