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.

Getting 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.

ARTICLE: 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)

OP-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 )

SCIENCE 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.

NATIONAL: "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.

NATIONAL: "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.

Got 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 . . .

Built 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.

Top 10 foreign policy wishes for 2009

My third-annual list of top 10 foreign policy wishes presented in reverse order of urgency:

10. President Obama's speech in New Delhi to the world's Muslims.

The president-elect will speak in an Islamic capital in his first 100 days. While the "hometown" choice is Jakarta, why not New Delhi? India possesses the world's third-largest Muslim population, twice that of traditional Arab leader Egypt, and could use some praise for its restraint -- so far -- after the Mumbai attacks.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

POST: 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)

CRIME: "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.

MARKETPLACE: "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.