Another one bites the dust
Sorry to see Tom Ricks' new book ("The Gamble") coming out on 10 Feb. It is certain to be a best-seller, meaning one less spot on the list for the rest of us wannabes.
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• The Man Between War and Peace • Track Tom's Great Powers progress • African Ambitions • The Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture • Tom's 6 of the 2007 Esquire 100 • Explaining Development-in-a-Box™ • The TED Video • Archive January 5, 2009Another one bites the dustSorry to see Tom Ricks' new book ("The Gamble") coming out on 10 Feb. It is certain to be a best-seller, meaning one less spot on the list for the rest of us wannabes. Down to 122 slidesGetting there. I've basically gotten the set down to the main arcs. Down from roughly 180MB to 68MB, so it opens faster! I spend the rest of tonight making slides come together a bit more so that every slide has all its components. Then I start the laborious task of animating. I would expect the final full brief to have something like 5,000 separate effects. You then combine a lot of the effects so you're looking at something between 500 and 750 clicks across 90 minutes. What rockets wroughtARTICLE: Israeli Troops Launch Attack on Gaza, By ISABEL KERSHNER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY, New York Times, January 3, 2009 It's hard to argue with Israel's perspective. If someone neighboring my country is routinely firing rockets into my cities, I am going to attack those installations and I'm not going to leave until that infrastructure is profoundly disabled. You can cite civilian casualties all you want, but when you fire rockets into my cities, then it's merely a matter of whose civilians die and my military's job is to make sure they're yours instead of mine. Simple as that so long as the rocket strikes remain the central issue. (Thanks: Aaron Brown) China and US from JapanOP-ED: China key to U.S. foreign policy success, By FRANK CHING, Japan Times, Jan. 3, 2009 Obviously, in line with what I've been saying for several years now, just stated very clearly and succinctly. (Thanks: Craig Nordin ) The blistering, 61-year-race that was nuclear proliferationSCIENCE TIMES: "The Hidden Travels of The Bomb," by William J. Broad, New York Times, 9 December 2008. Fascinating chart showing how the bomb travels from the U.S. (1945) to USSR (1949) and UK/Canada (1952) and France (1960) an then onto China (1964) and Israel (1967) and India (1974). Then we see Pakistan (1990) and North Korea (2006). That gives us 9 nuclear powers after 61 years. Clearly, proliferation is dangerously "out of control"!!!! Next up are Iran, along with--potentially--Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and arguably Turkey. Of those, I see only Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as serious contenders. They would take us up to 12 nuclear powers. Countries that got nukes or very close and then abandoned the programs include Belarus, Ukraine, Kazazkstan, Sweden, South Africa, Iraq, Switzerland, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil and Libya. I see North Korea joining their ranks soon enough. We created (through spies we did not catch or technology we chose to share) the first wave of nuclear powers. France and China created the second wave. Pakistan and North Korea create the future ones. Since I was a kid, I have heard that we're within a few years of 30-to-40 nuclear states, meaning states with nuclear weapon arsenals. Still waiting on that one. A big man who would have made Commerce a big jobNATIONAL: "Richardson Relishes Role As a Closer on Big Deals," by James C. McKinley Jr., New York Times, 9 December 2008. I think Richardson would have been great at Commerce, so the loss here is substantial. He is a Clinton-like (Bill, that is) closer, a dealer-in-chief who can easily step up from the governor level to the national stage. And given where the global economy is today, this would have been a hugely important and influential job--if done at a caliber I believe Richardson was capable of. I expected big things . . . and for Richardson to be rewarded down the road as a result with an even bigger job. But such is politics. As cities are labs for global warming, they also presage a post-Caucasian AmericaNATIONAL: "In Biggest U.S. Cities, Minorities Are at 50%," by Sam Roberts, New York Times, 9 December 2008. In Cool It, Bjorn Lomborg points out that cities have already undergone a century-long temperature rise equivalent to that predicted for the planet over the 21st thanks to global warming. Similarly, cities are telling us now what a post-Caucasion-majority America will look and act like. January 4, 2009Down to 235Got rid of/consolidated 65 slides tonight. Gotta quite before I mouse-click myself into a neck brace! My trick after all that concentrated work: the Bowflex. One 20-min session and I am corrected! Back at it in the morning . . . The great slim downBuilt the first section of the new brief almost entirely by scratch. That ended up being about 23 slides that I will eventually slim down to 5 or 6, mostly by layering extensively, and I don't want to do that until I run the brief a bunch of times and know how things work and how they naturally group together. Today I plotted out all of Bradd Hayes' slides to the remaining 11 sections, and when I passed them all out and stuffed in the keepers from the old brief, I had a brief of 300 slides! Now I slim it all down to probably about 100, which in the non-layered approach, actually equates to about a two-hour brief that in about a year will be compressed down to 50 or so thickly-layered slides. Getting it from 300 thin slides to 100 thin slide won't be that hard. Some will be easy to layer, like a 15-slide sequence that shows the growth of the United States. Some I will just toss as neat points, but not strong enough to make the cut. Many will be squished together in very complex arrangements, where I take bits from 10 slides to build one. But for now, this is the working master file, meaning one I will keep at hand from here on out as my maximum pool of images. The next three days will be an insane push to get a package ready for the Thursday morning talk in DC. Column 134Top 10 foreign policy wishes for 2009 Read on at KnoxNews. January 3, 2009The draw of free landPOST: China's New Export: Farmers, By Xiao Qiang, China Digital Times, December 29, 2008 Another story (this one more from the Chinese supply-side) of Chinese farmers emigrating to Africa in search of free land. History repeats itself in this frontier-integrating age. (Thanks: Steve Epstein) Gangs rule over the most crime-free America in decadesCRIME: "The War on Gangs: Inside the feds' strategy to get hit men and enforcers off the streets," by Alex Kingsbury, U.S. News & World Report, 15 December 2008. Interesting story on how big-city PDs fight gangs: the gangs' weakness for weapons is their Achilles' heel. But here's what caught my eye: "Violent crime nationwide is hovering near its lowest levels in 30 years. But that's not the case in all of America's cities, where street gangs still account for an alarming share of death and destruction." Of course, even there, most of the death you're talking about is inter-gang. What drives all this competitive destruction? Our failed war on drugs. By not medicalizing the problem and decriminalizing use, we provide black market opportunities for criminals. Frankly, I'd rather see Big Pharma clean up. China is simply not yet a credible demand centerMARKETPLACE: "China Urges Its Airlines to Curb Plane Orders," by Daniel Michaels, J. Lynn Lunsford and Patricia Jiayi Ho, Wall Street Journal, 10 December 2008. A China that was its own demand center would not hold off on these purchases. That it is backing off these planned buys (stretching them out) tells us how not decoupled China's economy is from ours. In my opinion, it never will be, even as China becomes a serious global demand center in coming years. There simply is no independent power once you join the interdependent world. 'Development-in-a-Box' is a registered trademark of Enterra Solutions.
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