Africom's COLs will just be pre-conflict PRTs

Friend Hank Gaffney sent me recent PRT report out of Khost. Very interesting. Basically describing the same package and ops of the group down in Manda Bay, Kenya, that I profiled in Esquire, making it so apparent: same basic deal, just pre-conflict.

So you think of Africom as just one big collection of PRTs engaged in "pre-emptive nation-building."

If it needs to be done, and you can head off some conflict in advance, why not do now as opposed to later?

The private-sector space program "setback": BFD!

News stations going wild with the explosion that kills three, stating it's a "profound" setback to the private-sector's pursuit of space, to which I reply, Nonsense!

The whole reason for having a private sector on this is to get beyond needing to endure a "national tragedy" every time somebody gets killed.

If people are willing to take the risk, you let them try.

No tragedy.

.africa as a goal

Got this email yesterday.

Dr. Barnett,

Introducing Africom in July issue of Esquire, you write: " America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon... What we've not learned in Iraq -- or taken far too long to learn -- will have to be somehow acquired, soldier by soldier and tour by tour, on the ground in Africa ."

Digital network technologies and services will probably play a key role in furthering this common strategic mission for Africa and the USA. To that end, the deployment of a continental DNS infrastructure could be an invaluable asset. It would consist in both the physical communications network and the information services. And it would dynamically provide public and/or secure content to a broad range of stakeholders. Last but not the least, it would arguably ease the steep learning curve resulting from the dialog of different partners and cultures. The Armed Forces alone cannot carry out such a heavy burden. The real success of Africom shall depend on the participation civilian and military protagonists.

Meanwhile, I have written to ICANN to propose the creation of .africa, a continental Internet domain similar to the already approved .eu and .asia domains.

As you well know, through DARPA and the .mil domain, the Pentagon was the cradle of the TCP/IP Internet. Today, as the US military plans ahead for the Africom Command Region, I would like to seek your input on how the Pentagon and Enterra Solutions could work with Africa to turn .africa into reality. The result could be to the advantage of all parties.

I am a pioneer member of the Internet Society, and in the late 1990s, I worked with the USAID Leland Initiative to seed the Internet in 21 African countries.

Sincerely,

Tierno S. Bah
Promoter, .africa Project

Had Jenn set up phonecon and talked to this guy this a.m. while supervising my little ones on their bikes.

I told the guy, Enterra's always interested in packages to prove out new standards of resilience in developing environments, but that we're so busy right now following up on the contracts we've won/are winning for the port of Philadelphia, Kurdistan, elsewhere in the national security community, that I need his thought-leadering to have reached the point where he can propose, "These are the four guys we need to go see here, here, here, and here, to get the critical mass for some money to make something happen here, which we can then pre-sell to all sorts of interested parties, Africom possibly being one."

Between the Philly work on ports and the Development-in-a-Box stuff in Kurdistan, we think we're reaching a critical mass on the DiB concept (so much so that we're finding partners are already using the phrase to sell--ahem!), so it's just a matter of getting us close enough to executing something because--quite frankly--we've been too successful in thought-leadering on DiB recently.

But it is a fascinating process that seems to feed on itself, this effort to engender a SysAdmin-Industrial-Complex. The more momentum you build on the subject, the more players want to join in.

My question on this is, what do people know about the state of these kinds of efforts in Africa?

My experience on "bringing the Internet to Africa" is over a dozen years old (going back to USAID work in the early-mid 1990s), and I feel out of date on the subject. Obviously a ton of stuff is going on, but as the recent story I blogged pointed out, the penetration rate remains very low (less than 5%), so curious about what the state of affairs is, from the perspective of knowledgeable people.

Good example of the arguments I've made on China v. scandals

ARTICLE: "Bad News Tests China's Propaganda Arm: President Allows Some Criticism as Officials Scold Reporters Over Negative Stories," by Edward Cody, Washington Post, 27 July 2007, p. A16.

My column of a while back spoke to this issue: with every scandal, there is the requirement for just a bit more transparency.

Within that growing transparency, there naturally comes some debate on the preeminent role of the party (today's WAPO story). Hu's decision is much like the dynamic I described concerning the publication of PNM in China.

This is a little-by-little process that unfolds slowly over time. Everyone is looking for the big bang on this one, but far more likely is what I described in the original column: lotsa little bangs stretching over time.

Within each little bang, questions arise: "In all this growing complexity, how can we possibly rely on just the Communist Party to make all the big decisions?"

The Party knows the genie is out of the bottle. That's why it's pushing for a public policy infrastructure of independent thinking to help them expand the pool of expertise and--ultimately--decision-making. The more this happens, of course, the more you can expect very firm statements from the Party about how "This development in no way calls into question our supremacy," when--of course--the fact that the Party even has to say that proves the opposite is true.

In all these instances, our role is to say, "Yup, it's tough all right. Here's how we've learned to deal with it." And then let nature take it's course.

Good summary piece on Kim Jong Il's "Sopranos State"

ARTICLE: "The Sopranos State: As the U.S. pushes for a nuclear deal with North Korea, a TIME investigation reveals the criminal enterprises that keep Kim Jong Il in power," by Bill Powell and Adam Zagorin, Time, 23 July 2007, p. 45.

Hardly a new story. The WSJ did a column 1 on Kim's Bureau 39 far enough back for me to cite it in PNM.

But still, a good summary and up to date.

The good news? Kim is such a greedy pig, as are his fellow kleptocrats, that China whispering in his ear, "You can become your country's 'Deng' and still hold all power" could actually work, given enough pressure and time.

And, if Kim croaks near term and the criminal elite have little interest in propping up one of his sons like they once did Kim for years following his old man's death, then maybe that becomes the time when the buy-out deal can be explicitly negotiated.

The key for us? Keep up the pressure and the squeeze. China's advice only holds Kim's attention so long as we make life as difficult as possible for Bureau 39.

Good piece on Kenya in Vanity Fair

After that godawful, self-aggrandizing issue that Bono orchestrated, this piece, written by an actual African (what a thought!) is very good.

The author is a writer and it shows. Neat sketch of Kenyan history. His optimism on the place matches my own: not blowing off the rural poverty or disconnectedness, but sensing a critical mass with a post-Moi generation that's maturing and beginning to understand what it's capable of.

Find it here: Generation Kenya.

My favorite lines come at the end:

As I sit here, in upstate New York, and read The New York Times, or watch CNN, Africa feels like one fevered and infectious place. In this diseased world, viruses spread all over—and a small local crisis in one corner can infect the rest of the continent in one quick blink. In a highly suggestive New York Times piece, dated April 23, 2007, and titled "Africa's Crisis of Democracy," Nigeria's recent flawed election is used to show how everything democratic in sub-Saharan Africa is teetering on shaky stilts.

This habit—of trying to turn the second-largest continent in the world, which has 53 countries and nearly a billion people of every variety and situation, into one giant crisis—is now one of the biggest problems Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Ghana face.

We have learned to ignore the shrill screams coming from the peddlers of hopelessness. We motor on faith and enterprise, with small steps. On hope, and without hysteria.

Thanks to Jarrod Myrick for sending.

The Jack Rice show appearance...

Went okay.

Frankly, he came in a bit sensational and so I felt like I spent a lot of my time dialing down his implied statements, such as "America is building two dozen bases in Africa right now." I hate to let things like that pass on-air, because they're so misleading. So you do your best to not get trapped in answers that misinform more than they inform.

So I'd give myself a B- maybe, but I don't think I could have done any better given Rice's initial tone of alarmism. I realize he has to make everything sound quite dramatic, but I pride myself on providing strategic perspective, so there's a natural tension there.

Sean will post any archive link once it becomes available. The show goes on for another hour, so maybe later today.

On the air now with WCCO in Twin Cities

Listen in, if you can.

http://www.830wcco.com

Uribe delivers in Colombia, but gets no American respect in return

ARTICLE: "A hero at home, a villain abroad: Colombians reckon that Alvaro Uribe saved their country. It's a pity for them that so many outsiders don't see their president that way," The Economist, 14 July 2007, p. 40.

Violence is down, the economy's growing at 8%. I've already covered the rising FDI.

So why does Al Gore refuse to be seen with the guy at a recent, potential joint-appearance in Miami (recalling Obama's answer ...). Why does our Congress hold its nose at the proposed FTA with Colombia?

Has the guy been Rudy Giuliani-like in his tough-as-nails security approach? Yes. Does he cross lines here and there that a country like America find a bit nervy? Sure.

But can anyone argue with the results or the fact that this guy pulls it off without triggering a U.S. military intervention?

No.

But still we hold up the FTA accord and cut his military aid.

And guess how Colombia's government interprets that?

In the eyes of Colombian officials, the aid cut and trade snub in Washington therefore look like a case of punishing success.

Ah, but our side cites this or that scandal in terms of dealing with paramilitaries, when we should be noting that there's a scandal in the first place, not complaining about the speed or depth of response.

I wrote about this troubling phenomenon in Blueprint for Action (pp. 239-41), and here's what I said then:

If the Core is going to be successful in shrinking the Gap over time, we can’t settle into permanent “frontier outpost” mentalities with Seam States such as these, or others like Egypt and Thailand. If a country is important enough for the United States to lavish on it a certain amount of military cooperation or even substantial amounts of aid, like Egypt, then we need to go out of our way to reward such countries with far greater amounts of economic connectivity over time, in effect signaling not just the utility of such cooperation but the progressive advance of globalization itself. The European Union seems to be able to make this sort of dual-package approach work with the former socialist states of Eastern Europe, but anywhere we’re talking about essentially non-European cultures, the Old Core doesn’t seem to be following up whatsoever in matching economic connectivity with military connectivity, except for the U.S. decision to bring drug-war ally Mexico into the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) in the 1990s.

In effect we need to put our money where our mouths are in this global war on terrorism as we did during the Cold War, where we not only defended Japan, South Korea, and Western Europe but also went out of our way to establish broadband economic connectivity between these states and ourselves. In the current situation, we need to do more than just hold the line; we need to keep growing globalization by extending the military-market nexus through Seam States and into the Gap. Otherwise, what are we really selling to Seam States in this global war on terrorism? “You keep holding the line militarily so we here in the Core can keep on integrating our markets and living the good life?”

Of course, when Seam States, who seem permanently trapped in this unenviable situation, go overboard now and then in their military prosecution of whatever war we ask them to wage (e.g., drugs, rebels, terrorists), the United States tends to point fingers rather quickly, even when it can seem awfully hypocritical for us to do so. So as far as we’re concerned, Mexico never seems to do enough in the drug war, and Pakistan should be able to root out the terrorists in its northwest territories after years of supporting such activities against the Soviets in Afghanistan at our request, and Thailand should be careful not to crack down too indiscriminately on Islamic terrorists within its borders even as we wage fierce battles on a city-by-city basis in Iraq or suffer the embarrassment of the Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo prisoner-abuse scandals. But where is the much-improved economic connectivity that should accompany these great security efforts, and if they’re not coming fast enough—or deep enough, as in the case of Mexico—then should the United States be surprised that our security aid to and cooperation with these regimes often lead to unsatisfactory outcomes? If you’re Turkey and you’re still looking in at the EU after all these years of asking, why should you feel a special obligation to help the United States transform the Middle East?

The reward for serving on the front line of the global economy’s advance into the Gap has to be getting off that front line over time, otherwise what’s the point? For example, Mexico joined NAFTA over a decade ago and the war on drugs is still being fought primarily at the U.S.-Mexican border, not farther south. We need to be generating the reverse of the domino effect we once feared in Southeast Asia with the Communists: to make the effort to shrink the Gap at America’s side means you’re not only invited into the Core, but the Core makes a special effort to trigger similar integration for the countries around you.

Bottom line: we're just not rewarding Uribe like we should be. Guy carries that much water for you, you pay up. Not just to reward him, you want to set the example for others.

Very DeSoto story on African mortgage industry emerging

ARTICLE: "In Africa, Mortgages Boost An Emerging Middle Class: Zambian Experiment, With U.S. Help, Aims To Create a New Suburb," by Michael M. Phillips, Wall Street Journal, 17 July 2009, p. A1.

Everyone knows what it's like to do home remodeling: the nightmare of having it drag on forever and how your budget often determines the speed.

Well, imagine trying to build a house from scratch like that, because that's what it's like in Africa as a rule.

Herrick Mpuku has spent a decade building his family a house, and it's still not done. There are no kitchen cabinets, and the concrete-block walls haven't been plastered smooth. But now the 45-year-old economist is having a new home built--one he expect to go from groundbreaking to the final coat of paint within six months.

The difference? Mr. Mpuku built his first house the traditional African way: in excruciatingly slow stages, he bought the land, had the foundation laid, erected a few feet of wall and finally got a roof installed, whenever he had something left over from his paycheck. This time, he's getting a mortgage.

In between the rich and very poor are Africa's small middle class, which is only now getting access to the sorts of credit we all take for granted, like a mortgage.

This guy is buying into a subdivision that does what subdivisions do here regularly: package the whole damn thing up for a single price and bundle that cost into a home mortgage.

The World Bank says sub-Saharan Africa's middle class could grow from 13 million (2000) to as much as 43 million by 2030. Most are in South Africa for now, but pockets grow in Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. Just enough appear in concentration to attract outside investors from aging Core states that want higher returns.

Sooner than most think, that is what will bring China to Africa for more than just oil. As China ages, they will also need places to find higher returns.

The market is there. It's simply underserved.

Tope Lawani, Nigerian-born co-founder of the private investment firm Helios Investment Partners, says investors are starting to realize that the continent doesn't lack demand for middle-class goods and services, from air travel and electric power to hotel rooms and financial services. What's missing, he says, is companies willing to do business in Africa and create a competitive market to fulfill pent-up middle-class aspirations.

That's why perceptions matter so much: if you're Chinese and come into these environments, the place looks like home. If you're Western, it all looks too hard to manage.

Interestingly realistic take from Sarkozy on "Arab nukes"

Find it here: http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=13202.

Thanks to MG for passing along.

Already it is nice to see someone like Sarkozy running France. May not agree with everything he pushes, but the guy keeps it non-ideological and practical.

Development-in-a-Box(tm) is about direct connections

ARTICLE: "Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web," by Ron Nixon, New York Times, 22 July 2007, p. BU1.

I think I already glancingly blogged this one.

The story is one of a failed joint venture between an American company and the government of Rwanda, which dreams of becoming a cyber hub of East Africa, a laudable goal for a continent where only 4% have any access to the Net and most traffic (75%) gets routed through the UK or the US, "increasing expenses and deliver times."

No surprise on long pole in tent: African countries haven't done much on the connecting infrastructure. Too many competing issues gobble up time, attention and money, and so the connectivity infrastructure seems like a luxury not worth prioritizing. Better to double their aid, we are told by those who know better.

But here is the scary part, a la Collier's bottom billion: the more the digital divide grows, the harder it becomes for any catch-up strategy to work.

Even on the catch-up we have disagreements: push cell phones or cheap laptops first? Me? I would go with cellphones, since more and more of my web use is through my phone anyway, so it's hard to imagine a future built around laptops per se, especially in austere environments. I mean, I only used my Mac in Africa to watch movies.

My point here is the same one we make about ports (as Enterra looks beyond our pioneering work on port security in Philadelphia): Africa needs direct connections. It can't be running all its Internet through just the UK and the US and it can't have all its sea traffic to the U.S. going through Europe for repackaging according to security standards they've yet to meet in their own ports. We need to connect Africa directly to opportunities and make that rule-set exporting our primarily focus on aid and investment.

China should be watching the South Korean missionary hostage crisis in Afghanistan

South Korea is the world's great exporter today of Christian missionaries and God bless 'em for their passion and willingness to work so hard.

But you take that step and you necessarily spend some time walking through various valleys of death inside the Gap, where religion is life or death because it's a survival code.

For now, China hides behind its "charm offensive" and it's Joe Friday-like approach on raw materials ("Just the reserves, Ma'am."), but that inevitably exposes them to all sorts of competing survival codes inside the Gap, and even when they deftly navigate them, what remains is the opprobrium of the Core regarding its nasty associations (so damned if you do, and damned if you don't).

My point: China better get used to what it feels like having their workers killed or taken hostage, because when it happens, everyone turns to the local cops they can trust, and throughout most of the Gap, that remains the U.S. military--like it or not.

Brilliantly good piece by Kristof

OP-ED: The New Democratic Scapegoat, By Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, July 26, 2007

Hans said I would agree with every word and I do.

Why "maritime environmental damage/depletion" beat out global warming in my "Survivor" game

ARTICLE: "Global Fishing Trade Depletes African Waters: Poor Nations Get Cash, The Rich Send Trawlers; A Dearth of Octopus," by John W. Miller, Wall Street Journal, 18 July 2007, p. A1.

ARTICLE: "The New Wal-Mart Effect: Cleaner Thai Shrimp Farms," by Kris Hudson and Wilawan Watcharasakwet, Wall Street Journal, 24 July 2007, p. B1.

Reference my recent column on global warming versus other enviro concerns better tackled earlier (a la Bjorn Lomborg's subsequent arguments).

The big driver here is the global push to eat less red meat and eat more fish. That, as they say, changes everything. So the depletion issue ends up resembling that of oil: the Core gobbles up all its stuff fast and then starts to go farther afield to deplete the resources of the Gap.

In this piece, the focus is on Africa, which our intell community says loses about $1b a year in maritime resources that are simply stolen without payment.

But as this story points out, even when paid, Africa is getting ripped off. Why? Same old same old on Core subsidies to their own industries which makes them an overwhelming force when cruising the Gap, depleting historic fishing waters.

The Core spends upwards of $30 billion a year (EU leads at 7, then Japan at 5, then India right behind and China approaching 3, Brazil at 2, Russia right behind and U.S. at a mere 1.2). Against that sort of well-endowed competition for resources, the local Africans have little chance:

Such policies boost the number of working boats, increase the global catch and drive down fish prices. That makes it more difficult for fisherman in poor nations like Mauritania, who get no subsidies, to compete.

The end result: African waters are losing fish stock rapidly, with ramifications both to the economies of Africa's coastal nations and to the world's ocean ecology.

Fishing stocks are down 50% in three decades in the regional waters.

You want to whine on about how many inches the oceans rise this century or when the "oil peak" really hits, neither compares in immediacy (or idiocy, for that matter) with this.

You make it that much harder for coastal Africa, you maroon interior Africa (home to the largest chunk of Collier's "bottom billion") even more. Ninety-nine Chinese fishing boats in Mauritania's waters alone right now. Expect that number to go down on its own?

So the fishing subs start to smell an awful lot like our ag subs: question isn't, are we going to get our fish so much as what will be the price and how much do we create a floor that shuts out Africa?

The answer offered from Serafin Fernandez, managing director of a company that owns a Spanish vessel that harvests octopus around Mauritania:

"You have to have the EU, the Russians, the Chinese and all the small boats," he says. The solution, he contends, is for African countries to keep a tighter grip on their own waters, and to manage their resources through joint ventures with the help of fishing companies like [his own].

Is this not what we've basically done in the U.S. in cases of overfished areas?

But the key is the transparency, which Africa has little of. Stuff goes on like crazy in their waters and African coastal nations do not have a clue.

So boosting the transparency is key, and that's why I find this article so timely. One of my two pieces in the October issue of Esquire addresses a key part of the solution set here.

Better example of the sort of rule-set exporting we're (meaning, private sector) doing right now on maritime issues is Wal-Mart forcing Asian shrimp farmers to clean up their act (Wal-Mart's not waiting on the "great shrimp contamination story of 20XX!").

Wal-Mart's power over its middlemen is legendary: they set a new rule and the suppliers in turn put the screws to the OEMs or farmers.

The destruction of mangrove swamps and the pollution of natural waterways with waste from shrimp ponds has long drawn the ire of environmentalists, but in the past two years, Rubicon Resources LLC, a Los Angeles-based supplier of farmed shrimp to Wal-Mart, has bought and upgraded roughly 150 Thai shrimp farms. Among Rubicon's changes: increasing the testing and documentation of what is in its ponds, planting mangrove elsewhere to make up for the trees destroyed by its farms and standardizing treatment of the water discharged from its ponds.

Rubicon is pushing to meet a year-end deadline that all phases of shrimp production adhere to environmental and social standards backed by Wal-Mart, Red Lobster operator Darden Restaurants Inc, and other big buyers. The U.S.-based industry group that drafted the standards, the Global Aquaculture Alliance, plans to unveil similar guidelines this year for farming of tilapia and catfish, with standards for salmon following later. Wal-Mart pledges to endorse those, too, and to require compliance from its suppliers.

Now, make no mistake, the pressures created by this dynamic will mean a lot of inefficient and pollutive small firms will get bought up and consolidated by larger companies, with the first ones being foreign-based. You can lament this loss of the "old ways," just like we all cry over the loss of the family farm here in the States, but that's how you get the safety locked down despite the high volume.

And in the end, that's how we export rules, the most important export we have.

So when people say, "I wish Tom spoke more about soft power," they're just not paying attention to what I am saying and have been saying all along: rules are everything, and we're the world's biggest exporters of rules. Go back to PNM. This is the basis of everything I do and preach.

It's also why I'm senior managing director of Enterra Solutions, who's entire raison d'etre is the dynamic management of complex ruleset environments.

The globalization of labor needs a new rule set

MONEY & BUSINESS: "Labor Unions Without Borders: Will workers of the world (finally) unite? Leaders say yes, but barriers loom," by Renuka Rayassam, U.S. News & World Report, 16 July 2007, p. 46.

BRIEFING: "A world wide web of terror: Al-Qaeda's most famous web propagandist is jailed, but the internet remains its best friend," The Economist, 14 July 2007, p. 28.

Interesting first piece that got me thinking.

You think about unions as useful primarily in the "rising" or industrialization phase and less so once you move into the post-industrial, where hopefully you're covering most people with portable benes like medical and retirement (I realize that's a grand simplification, but tell me where I'm wrong).

If that's the case, then you see unions dying on the vine in increasingly post-industrial/manufacturing US (as a share of GDP, value of manufacturing remains stable, as Brink Lindsey points out, and it's just less people involved over time) and fighting a rear guard action to prevent undercutting by rising New Core economies (esp. China).

Like my advice to industry in general: you can't fight this and win, so better to join and co-opt. For industry, they need access to the rising markets and the globalizing R&D and the cheaper labor, plus they want to be part of the roll-up that creates tomorrow's globally-integrated enterprises that not only sell to the connected world but become agents of connection to the bottom billion by reacquainting themselves with the challenges of selling to the bottom of the pyramid.

To miss out on this global evolution is simply to say goodbye to the future.

So this article makes sense to me: unions need to "go back to the future" by moving into countries where their role as organizers and rule-set providers remains at its peak (no longer in the Old Core but now in the New Core). Plus, by tapping into that dynamic, they set the standards for the planet by capturing so many bodies at once.

The alternative, again, is withering on the vine back home, becoming increasingly irrelevant.

So yeah, it's not just al Qaeda taking advantage of the web and cheaper air travel and lower communications barriers.

You gotta remember that with any new connecting technology, the bad guys always get out ahead at first, only to later be overwhelmed by legitimate uses and put on the run by increasingly sophisticated policing and judicial systems. We're just beginning to peak on our understanding of the info revolution. So none of this surprising, just annoying.

Tom's on the radio this afternoon [Update 2]

WCCO AM 830 CBS radio Minneapolis/St. Paul
Looks like they have a live stream, so if you're available you should try it out.

2:40 pm Eastern time

The USN&WR column

Tom's new column on China is up:

Managing China's Ascent

Realists insist the U.S. and China are slated for military conflict in the decades ahead. America cannot peacefully accommodate China's rise because it subverts our role as the world's lone superpower.

Let me offer a different vision.

Check it out.

The hard-copy version will appear in the issue that comes out early next week. China will be the cover, so should be easy to spot.

Cranking ...

Got up woozy as all hell from allergies. Indiana is bad right now, and Indy's pollution makes it worse. I must admit, I miss Rhode Island's cleansingly stiff breezes. Vonne and I head back there soon for a brief sojourn.

Took a transAtlantic call to start the day: one last interview for an upcoming piece in the October Esquire.

Then a long call with a conference organizer of manufacturers. I will speak to them in October, and while this guy loved my writing, he wanted to be sure I could relate things to manufacturers, so I gave him my view of globalization relating to manufacturing and cinched the gig. You end up doing this a lot: the organizer hears you're a great speaker but then wants to check you out verbally over the phone, so you perform like hell. No offense taken at being asked to audition. Plenty of money on the line, and this guy's on the hook for a good show, so if it were me, I'd want a long clarifying call too.

Then I finish my column for next weekend, taking two headlines from last week (one NYT and one WSJ) and exploring the question of "What is victory in the long war?"

Then I penned some additional paras for the Esquire piece (longer one) based on the morning's interview.

Then I spent a bunch of time answering fact-checker questions from an Esquire staffer on the two pieces I have in production for the "top 100 ideas" October issue.

Ah, the life of the stay-at-home (for today) writer. Very nice.

Then some Bowflex in my continuing attempts to move the stone fragments along, and then off to help coach my kids' grade school cross-country team, as our small school is finally back to having its own team (a guy who coached for years earlier came back even though his kids are in HS, which is great of him). I ran all the drills and the long run with the kids, which was a lot of fun. To me, starting XC reminds me fall is on the way, and fall means Packers, and I have tix to four games (Chargers and Vikes at Lambeau and then I take the entire family to Detroit for the Turkey Day game and take my wife to St. Louis for the Rams in December. After never seeing Favre, Vonne gets to see him three times this year (me five, counting the preseason game). I can't wait.

Also gotta check out Peyton in Terre Haute where the Colts train up in August. If possible, I may blow the bucks to catch the Pats when they come here. That should be a doozy. I would go just to cheer against Randy Moss!

Tom at the Smithsonian

Tom will be speaking at the Smithsonian Symposium Creating a Sustainable Future in a Complex World Saturday, October 27, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tickets are required if you would like to attend, sold at the link above. Check it out.