Monday, January 15, 2007 at 9:29AM For those of you wondering, based on the Pats win... I got a pair on Stubhub this a.m.
Wanted to be close to see the look on Belichek's face...
Stubhub is a fascinating success story, BTW.
Monday, January 15, 2007 at 9:14AM ARTICLE: Euro displaces dollar in bond markets, By David Oakley and Gillian Tett, Financial Times.com, January 14 2007
An interesting development that reflects the EU's aging (demographics) as much as its rise (growing liquidity enabled by single currency and greater reliance on bonds versus banks.
Scary to some (U.S. dominance challenged), but it signals a more efficient and agile global financial market (euros as alternative to dollar as circumstances demand).
As Asia's needs for more efficient financial markets grows (that great infrastructural build-out alone), watch the logic emerge for an Asian-wide single currency (built around pillars SK, Japan and China/India) that gives that part of the world the same options the EU is discovering, if only for the same social dynamic rapidly emerging there in due time (aging demographics means governments want to float more debt).
For now, rising Asia is useful to the aging West, because they'll buy our debts and assets as our Boomers retire in droves, cashing out of markets (for every seller there needs to be a buyer).
But take the next step, noting--for example--China's rapid aging (no demographic sweet spot lasts forever--notes the increasingly balding, middle-age-spreading Barnett) and ask yourself this question, "Who buys out the Chinese?"
That, my friends, is why the Gap will be shrunk.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
It's also the most powerful social force in human history, dwarfing religious fervor by a huge margin.
Thanks to Terry Collier for sending this in.
Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 1:24PM + Wilsonizer is reading PNM on Hugh's recommendation.
+ gringoman, a frequent commenter here, linked the weblog in a recent post.
+ Garrick Van Buren linked Talking surge on WAPO radio.
+ So did Right Talk.
+ Just as some of y'all took exception with Tom's assertion that he will lose his ability as a grand strategist as he ages in Strategic Alzheimer's--coming to a grand strategist near me!, so did A Midwest Journal.
+ Indistinct Union linked The New Iraq Strategy.
+ God is a Beer Drinker linked 6 reasons not to worry about all those Chinese men.
+ Valley of the Shadow gives Tom credit for Bush's Iraq plan being part of a 'Long Game'.
+ Badgers Forward, written by 'An Army Officer in Iraq commanding an Engineer Company', recommends reading Tom's books.
+ The Glittering Eye linked The SysAdmin has been in Iraq for a long time, now comes the belated attempt at Development in a Box.
+ So did Outside the Beltway.
+ TKS on National Review Online linked Hugh's first full interview with Tom.
+ So did NonParty Politics.
Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 1:33AM Iran: This emperor has no clothes
Americans swallow enemy propaganda at face value, subjecting us to knee-jerking manipulation by fiery orators. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with a few choice phrases, successfully elevates himself to the status of a Muslim "Hitler." But this populist windbag is already losing his grip in Tehran, giving Washington a strategic opportunity we don't yet appreciate.
While American neocons and Israeli hawks would bomb Iran today, lest it continue enriching uranium, try viewing the situation less emotionally.
Read on at KnoxNews
Read on at Scripps Howard
Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 1:29AM ARTICLE: Gates Ties Iraq Push to Drawdown: Successful Troop Boost Could Mean Withdrawal Starting by Year's End, He Says, By Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, January 13, 2007; Page A01
Some telegraphing here by Gates: by end of year, expect Bush team to admit some version of failure with heavy blame on Iranian meddling (and there will be plenty, which will be progressively "discovered!" as year unfolds in a series of "disturbing revelations" that "no one could have seen coming!"--hence no blame assessed within administration), as White House gears up strong sale (already being pushed by GOP hawks on Hill) for military strikes against Tehran. The basic game plan? A new splendid little war to divert attention from numbers 1 (Afghanistan-bleeding-into -Pakistan) and 2 (Iraq collapsing in on itself).
Problem? Our only ally this time will be Israeli hawks.
Friday, January 12, 2007 at 2:53PM It's a simple observation to make, but most of the Gap's militaries are just national police in khaki or green, meaning their primary function is internal order--not external defense.
Even so, most Gap nations' effective police forces are the thinnest of thin blue lines, especially on a local basis. It's the opposite of the U.S., where our cops are bottom heavy in their distribution (no, not a doughnut jibe), meaning the bulk are local, then a thinner bulk at the county level, thinner still at the state trooper level, and then thinnest up at the national level.
So Bing (an old acquaintance from my time at the Center for Naval Analyses) is dead on in pointing out that the Iraqi military logically takes a back seat to the local Iraqi police in any scenario pathway you'd hope to call "successful."
And you don't hear as much about the cops as you do the military, but segueing from the latter to the former is a big deal in any postwar environment--the essence of a return to some normality (as corrupt as such institutions often are inside the Gap). Until cops replace soldiers, the forces of civilian recovery typically do not mobilize in critical mass numbers.
Private-sector capital flows (not public aid) are the Holy Grail of post-whatever recovery. As soon as some foreign capitalists trust your present enough to plant some big factory inside your border, you've got a future. You've been magically transformed from less-developed country to low-cost country.
That's because jobs are the only lasting exit strategy--not uniforms, but jobs.
But capital is a coward, so the cops matter first and foremost.
Friday, January 12, 2007 at 10:51AM Reality of next 12 days does not bode well for blog, so expect lotsa small entries fed mostly by readers. I have stack of papers to peruse (later arriving paper copies), but even those are being down-prioritized.
Bit of a perfect storm for me: gotta edit the Fast Company piece, gotta storm on something for Warren and Esquire, got a big Enterra strategy session stretching over days, plus two DC talks, plus a dinner theater with wife and in-laws, plus all the usual Enterra odds and ends and two columns to pen.
The good news: the new iMac is here for my office!
Friday, January 12, 2007 at 10:41AM ARTICLE: Population Controls, Including Abortion, Spark Gender Imbalance in China; 30 Million More Men Expected in 15 Years, Friday, FOXNews.com, January 12, 2007
Spoke of this in BFA. The "bare branches" bit is way oversold.
First, many of these males are found in rural areas. Those who can make a good life will find a wife locally or import them from elsewhere in Asia. Not an historical first and not that hard. Middle-age Japanese men already importing Chinese wives.
Second, many of these men leave in undocumented fashion. Baby girls aborted or given up for adoption, but unattached males often sneak out as economic refugees in their early adulthood, which makes males the biggest village export from China right now (well-documented in NYT).
Third, by 2020 China will see 100 million of its citzens travel abroad each year, so personal access to foreign women hardly restricted.
Fourth, the notion of Chinese society casually sending off single sons to war is BS. In China they call it the 4-2-1 problem: 4 grandparents, 2 parents, one son to support all.
Fifth, China's PLA is moving away from bodies to capital, so little desire there to pack them up for war.
Sixth, the notion of social distress is mitigated by rising incomes, which facillitates for successful males the opportunities described above, and for unsuccessful ones, the chance to emmigrate (again, something that happens a lot).
Demographers tell us numbers but their track record on predicting social responses is very weak.
Bigger issue in my mind is rising elder population, mostly rural. To me, the excess-males-means-war scenario is yet another example of analysts trying to hold on to the China enemy image they so desperately desire. China has gone through, is going through now, and will go through in the future, so many harder issues that I tend to downplay the alleged profoundity of this trend. If China wasn't seeing so many rural males emmigrating now and wasn't opening up so much (to include a rapid rethink on sending off "unwanted daughters" (a historical blip soon to disappear as more childless Chinese couples begin to value girls more)), then I'd be worried, but all those things are happening.
Thanks to the reader who sent this in who might wish to remain nameless.
Thursday, January 11, 2007 at 10:40AM "Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America's course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror. … It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq."
With those words, President Bush began his long awaited speech about a new course for the war in Iraq. Although most pundits, and certainly the Democrat-controlled Congress, will focus on the fact that he is surging more than 20,000 troops, we are much more intrigued by the non-military strategy the President outlined -- the non-kinetics that will go along with the implied kinetic ability (i.e., use of weapons) of all those extra boots on the ground. Because this new non-traditional approach aligns closely with an approach we have been advocating as Development-in-a-Box, we (Stephen DeAngelis and Tom Barnett) decided to co-author a blog and post it simultaneously on our blog sites.
We are not certain that 20,000 new troops will be sufficient to secure the necessary stability to give the non-military strategy a chance to succeed, but we are heartened that the value of the non-military strategy we have been advocating -- very much in line also with the new counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine published jointly by the Marines and Army -- is finally being recognized. We hope that it doesn’t come too late. The President stated:
"A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced. … To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend 10 billion dollars of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. … We will give our commanders and civilians greater flexibility to spend funds for economic assistance. We will double the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams. These teams bring together military and civilian experts to help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen moderates, and speed the transition to Iraqi self reliance. And Secretary Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq."
The White House posted an outline of this new strategy and highlighted some of its key points. Among the actions that the coalition will take are these:
To achieve some of these objectives, the President announced, "We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilians to deploy overseas where they can help build democratic institutions in communities and nations recovering from war and tyranny." Enterra Solutions is committed to supporting these reconstruction efforts, whether it is helping the military Provincial Reconstruction Teams or other, purely civilian, efforts to help rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.
The President and Congress agree that Iraqis must assume responsibility for security within the country. That is a tall order. But rebuilding infrastructure must be accomplished simultaneously with achieving security. We believe that our Development-in-a-Box approach, which embraces best practices and standards, local flexibility, capacity building, and broad-based communities of practice, offers a way forward. We look forward to working with others who also embrace this approach.
Thursday, January 11, 2007 at 6:10AM Just got off a conference call with about 40 people attending Don Beck's annual (or semi-?) "spiral dynamics" conference in DC.
I've done these conference calls for a while now, and I really love them, because I can totally riff off the top of my head, jazz-like, knowing I can keep the audience easily, this being such a smart, forward-leaning bunch and also a crew that knows my stuff intimately, thanks to Don.
So, it's a group I sort of trying out summing-up Grand Unifying Theory definitions.
Anyway, one question was about my critique of the aging Boomers' strategic leadership (14 years and counting now in the White House) and my hopes for a JFK-like jump to the next generation (that sliver I and so many others occupy between the tail end of the boom and the beginning of the X-gen demographic bust), and it amounted to challenging my assumption that all the long-term trends (huge pulse coming in Asia for global economy, accessing that infrastructural build-out gives us the knowledge to sell to the bottom of the Gap pyramid, my usual arguments on demographics in the Middle East and the various Islamic reformations already in the works) favor us on globalization's continued advance. And this guy's question was a bit defensive because I went on and on previously about the conformity imprinting the Boomers got in the 1950s and how ultimately it limits their strategic imagination terribly--despite all the bullshit about free speech and free thinking from their coming-of-age Sixties experience), and he said--in effect-- that I was assuming the whole world wanted to get globalization and become Americans.
Of course, that's the old bugaboo that Thomas Friedman's brilliantly portrayed in "Lexus": the Egyptian who asks him, Does globalization mean we all have to become Americans?
And so I responded, as I always do on this point, that the future of globalization's cultural face is increasingly Asia, not the West, so I wasn't assuming any uniformity whatsoever, but one helluva diversity by our narrow standards (recalling my old joke on Rhode Island: "Diverse, hell yes! We've got both kinds of Catholics here: Irish and Portugese!).
Anyway, after the talk, I realized that if the Boomers' strategic imaginative moment was historically limited, that's no different from any generation, including mine and Obama's.
I got this first from Karl Marx himself, who said that any theoretician/visionary/whatever is always limited by his generational experience (actually, Marx's argument was about stages of history relating to capitalism's emergence), the simple concept being: we all eventually lose it.
I will lose it, probably in my early sixties. I know this, and my sense of a timeline forced by events beyond my control is no better or worse than Osama bin Laden's. I know the clock is running on me, and that soon enough, I'll lose the ability to think beyond the conventional wisdom, so infused will I be in it myself.
So another good reason to get Vol. III ("release the inner grand strategist in you!") down in print at the height of my powers, before the strategic Alzheimer's kicks in.
Thursday, January 11, 2007 at 3:22AM Another thing that baffles me with this neocon/hawk push to define Iran as near-term military action (e.g., pushing hard to position the "what is to be done?" argument in the 2008 race), is that Iran remains years away from the serious combo of missiles and nukes, while North Korea is already there today (tests missiles, detonated a nuke). North Korea can't fight us asymmetrically like Iran can due to our Iraq tie-down. Plus, dealing with NK first settles us out considerably with China, freeing resources in Asia for the fight and potentially tapping an ally with very similiar interests (you think China doesn't want cheap dependable oil from the Gulf?).
The radical Salafi jihadist movement's only hope long term is to pit rising East against aging West. By holding Iran short-term and China long-term as preferred enemies, the neocons and hawks do their myopic best to deliver this outcome right into bin Laden's hands with their inability to discriminate the strategic battlefield whatsoever. China's actions on energy signal a clear overlap on strategic interests, our willful ignorance of which is just plain sad. And conflating Iran-the-Shiia-threat with Al-Qaeda-the-Sunni-based-movement is just plain dumb. The conspiracy theorist in me just wonders if Bush simply does want one conflict following upon another, it's that strategically stupid.
Again, where is the grand strategic thinking with Bush and Cheney? Where is a sense of sequencing and making the fight as unfair to our enemies as possible by constantly maximizing our assets while minimizing theirs?
This is a Long War? But Bush fights it with no sense of time. If FDR had fought WWII like this, we would have invaded Europe and pushed on Japan at the same time (instead we worked Japan for years and didn't open real second front in Europe til summer 44--made possible by alliance with past-and-future foe (but then ally of convenience) Soviet Union.
Where is this sort of strategic vision from Bush? He and the neocons just seem to want to fight everybody all at once, which accomplishes the twin problems of: 1) making us look confused and isolated (who wants to join this merry-go-round approach?) and making us look ineffective (Iraq), which only emboldens our enemies more and cows potential allies.
Bush and Cheney are our own worst enemies in this regard. Their inability to think strategically preordains suboptimal outcomes. It is tragic, really, given the huge costs: people, money, but most of all--opportunity.
To me, this is a strategic incompetence that history will judge very harshly.
This administration is urgent in all the wrong places and slow-footed in all the necessary areas. Our leadership remains our greatest weakness.
Thursday, January 11, 2007 at 3:18AM ARTICLE: To Counter Iran’s Role in Iraq, Bush Moves Beyond Diplomacy, By HELENE COOPER and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times, January 11, 2007
This is where I part ways with Bush dramatically (Iran), as I argue in my column this weekend. Adding the Iranian fight on top of the Iraqi effort right now comes close to dooming our effort.
Iran will simply intensify the fight in Iraq and conflate it elsewhere, like it did in Lebanon last August. We'll feel more and worse short-term pain.
I mean, that's not even being clever on Iran's part, that's just not having their heads up their asses.
I agree you work Iran in the future if no improvement there, but why telegraph your punch endlessly with axis of evil back then and stuff like this now? How can this administration act with such secrecy and duplicitousness at home and remain so godawfully transparent to our enemies abroad? There's stupid in your living room and then there's stupid on my front lawn: I don't have to do anything about the former, but the latter will earn a response. I thought that response came with the November election, but Bush and Cheney are effectively blowing that popular will off, and you know what? This time those "dumb average Americans" are outperforming the Vulcans in more ways than I care to calculate.
If Bush made the Big Bang seem sequential (like the Balkans unfolded), then the American people would be able to come along. But if he makes it seem additive, as I arguedin PNM, he loses them, especially when Iran will forcefully pursue an asymmetrical strategy designed to prevent any effective U.S. response down the road.
Ahmadinejad did well by Bush's speech last night. Our troops will suffer as a result in Iraq.
This is Bush's biggest problem in grand strategic thinking: too expansive in defining enemies (especially over time, thus telegraphing punches way in advance), and way too unimaginative in defining friends.
The incurious president costs us a whole lot over the long haul of this Long War--i.e., he just doesn't seem to know enough about the world to overrule the neocon-in-chief, Cheney.
Thursday, January 11, 2007 at 12:57AM Lotta people sending me emails about Bush's speech last night: Do I see the SysAdmin emerging in Iraq finally?
To me, events in Iraq have been molding the SysAdmin function/force for several years in Iraq (with some of those effects felt primarily back here), to include things like the splitting of the command there a while back (one to fight, one to train), the new counter-insurgency doctrine back here, DoD directive 3000 (demanding commands plan equally for postwar, etc.
What I saw in the president's speech last night was more the realization that jobs are the ultimate exit strategy, thus the first enunciation of something very close to what Steve DeAngelis and I have been advocating for a while with Development in a Box (right down to the infrastructure czar).
To that end, Steve and I are co-posting a joint blog entry later this morning on the subject.
As I've said many times before, these changes don't come about because they're cool or visionary. They come about because the failures demand them.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 7:15AM I'm going to use this post, and link to it from the top of this column, to keep track of Tom's appearances on Hugh's show, with transcripts, and audio. They are covering PNM chapter by chapter.
+ Introduction, January 5th Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 1, January 9th: Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 2, January 16th, Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 3, January 23rd, Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 4, January 30th, Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 5, February 6th, Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 6, February 13th, Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 7, February 20th, Audio | Transcript
+ Chapter 8, February 27th, Audio | Transcript
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 7:14AM ARTICLE: "World's Assets Hit Record Value Of $140 Trillion," by Joanna Slater, Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2006, p. C8.
McKinsey report generates map of financial assets flows and holdings among world's great regions.
One missrepresentation, IMHO, is showing Singapore and Hong Kong like some isolated offshoot of Euro/UK (colonial habit, one imagines), when all that money flowing into both also overwhelmingly flies right out again to developing Asia and especially China (something the map seems to ignore, but I know happens in bulk because FDI flows outward as a percentage of GDP in these two financial hubs is virtually as high as the inward flow percentages).
Other than that weird bit, a cool map very much like ones I drew for the FDI "economic security exercise" with Cantor Fitzgerald atop the World Trade Center back in 2000 (see here for details).
Factoid of note: America attracts 85 percentage of all money put on the table by asset-exporting regions.
The future? Asset flows are expected to grow 50 percent faster than goods and services in coming years.
Total financial flows in 2005 were $6T, twice the flow in 2002 and significantly higher than in 1999, the height of the bubble.
Yes, yes, globalization is "in retreat" and soon to "end." Light up your doobie on that one, because as you know (he pauses while holding his lungs for effect), "those damn terrorists are running everything maaaaaaaaaan!"
There are those who understand the force and those who only see the friction.
There are those who see only war and those who get the "everything else.
Want to be a grand strategist?
Or do you want to live out your lives in fear, letting others define your nightmares while you give up on your dreams?
Morning glory indeed. Globalization's greatest push is just beginning...
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 7:12AM OP-ED: "Two Alliances: U.S.-Sunni versus U.S.-Shiite," by Edward Luttwak, Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2006, p.A17.
Great piece by Luttwak exploring how sometimes (in Iraq) we need to be pro-Shiia and not be afraid of making Sunni states nervous and sometimes (in Lebanon vis-a-vis Syria) we need to be pro-Sunni and not worry about making Shiia leaders (Syria, Iran) nervous.
To me, that comes a lot closer to playing the board instead of having the board play you and--in effect--keeping the Big Bang alive (which Luttwak suggests is happening).
That's a key point we often forget: just because Iraq goes south doesn't mean the Big Bang dies. The BB is about shaking up existing orders and making others possible, and to me, that includes being realistic about what comes next, which is Shiia revivalism, to use Nasr's term.
That's a helluva useful thing to put into play. Scary to some, but--again--let's be realistic about two things: 1) Tom Jefferson ain't the next guy who'll show up when you topple the typical dictator (that's just too big a leap) and 2) that development gets us back in the business of competing directly with Osama (we both want to destabilize corrupt authoritarian regimes in the region, we just want different outcomes).
Now, where Luttwak doesn't go is where I'm dying to go: play Iran more as a scary balancer. The more we dialogue (none yet) with Iran on Iraq, the more we freak the Saudis and the easier it becomes to splinter Syria because we're basically playing prisoner's dilemma with both Damascus and Iran--as in, who's gonna bite first because we'll go harder on the other next.
Beyond that, I also advocate talking direct to Iran on the nukes issues, playing them like a USSR on missiles by linking carrots of connectivity with greater assurances that we'll not invade, thus giving rising pragmatists and moderates inside Iran something to reach for besides perceived humiliation in caving in to the Americans. Ahmadinejad's just been "thumped" on the mid-term elections, with Rafsanjani clearly resurrecting. We need to exploit that dynamic to our own, soft-kill ends.
But instead, we play the Big Bang 3-D chess game on just one level--hell, mostly just one square called Baghdad!
And that's too bad. A serious Henry Kissinger-James Baker type would be shuttling like mad, playing angle off angle. Instead we have talking-point Condi and just-say-no Cheney letting all the sacrifice for, and early momentum of, the Big Bang go largely to waste.
Again, it's a fundamental lack of strategic imagination.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 7:11AM ARTICLE: "Cuban Economists Envision Role For Markets in Post-Castro Era," by Bob Davis, Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2006, p. A1.
Great stuff. Just seeing this thinking out in the open even before Castro croaks is a very good sign.
And the scenario described here is very realistic: small marketizing reforms at first, with no explicit acceptance of foreign direct investment (but just watch the informal flows boom from Miami) and once they get so far with that and no further, they'll want serious money and the opening-up process will rapidly balloon out of control.
Raul will rule with committees galore and new names will rise that we've never heard of before.
Then before he croaks (or when), we'll see serious reformers step up, "new era" and all that, and the popular push for direct elections will begin.
None of this happens overnight, but within five years Cuba is unrecognizable. The young will love it and dub it the "second revolution" and the old will be baffled and nostagically pine for the good old days. Old Miami Cubans will be shocked that the Cuba of their youth is not resurrectable, but they won't care given all the freedom to visit back and forth.
Sooner than any can imagine, life in Cuba will ramp up so close to that in Miami, the talk will begin of going all the way toward joining the U.S. Then, depending on the presidential election year, you'll start seeing Cuban statehood as a staple of Florida's electoral quid pro quo (just like sanctions support got you the Cuban vote in the past).
Going to be fascinating to watch.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 7:10AM ARTICLE: Mutual Interest: The United States and China find themselves with a common cause, Times Online, January 10, 2007
A simplistic comparison to some, a profound realization to others.
But no question about it, the reproducible strategic concept of Sino-American alliance is spreading.
And yes, I am testing Chapter One readers...
Thanks to Michal Shapiro for sending this.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 3:53AM Nice to see them so prominently displayed.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 3:51AM I've been asking Scripps Howard if they knew how to gauge how many outlets were picking up my column. I got this interesting reply, apparently from my handler there:
There are more than one answer to that question, depending on why the question is asked. But despite the fuzzy math, you could safely say that about 300 newspapers, newsletters and Web sites subscribe to the news service. You might also tell him there is an established pattern when we put new columns on the wire. And that pattern is there is a slow, gradual and fairly predictable growth over the first 9 to 12 months. The smaller newspapers usually commit first, followed by the larger newspapers and, finally, the middle sized newspapers. That usually happens regardless of what type of column it may be. And to help that along, I've begun moving his columns on Fridays, rather than on a time-available schedule, because for a newspaper to commit on a weekly basis, the column must get to them on a predictable schedule. Otherwise, they use it only on a space available basis. And a Friday schedule currently is the one with the least competition and where he likely will get the most looks.
Interesting no? Especially the bit about small, then large, then medium.
