This very interesting chart was prepared for a US military Centcom briefing about two weeks ago. It’s dated 10/18. To me the most remarkable thing is the distance moved toward "chaos’ in just the week prior.
I thought this alone was interesting for people to look at on its ow. Also, I’m going to start another thread on my idea that this is part of whay I call a “truth coup” by career government people to destroy the Bush administration – which U think is an ok thing, pretty much.
Oops sorry, the link above was to a NY Times story about the chart. The chart itself is here.
By counting pixels in Photoshop, I’ve determined that Iraq is now 83.3% of the way along the path from peace to chaos. Another year on this course, and they’ll reach 100%.
Now, see, what you have to do is listen to John Kerry, and stay dumb about things. Then we’ll all be stuck in Iraq which is all the way to the top left of the chart–it’s way to the left past “Peace”, and up high in a much, much better place.
Tripler
Listen, this is quickly becoming my generation’s Vietnam.
[sub]All words carefully crafted for this post. All alliteration and mental imagery intended–'specially the part that if we don’t get smart quick, a lot more people are gonna wind up dead.[/sub]
Cal you tell what percentage the advances is between the two marks a week apart?
I am SOOO glad I’m too old to be drafted and have no kids to worry about. I have some very good friends with kids in the military, and they are not happy with how their children are being fed into what looks to be an eternal ware.
About 3.6%. So 4 1/2 weeks at that rate would get us to 100% chaos.
It’s nothing like Vietnam! George W. Bush has been there.
What really gets me is the “ethnic cleansing is happening” thing.
So, are we now just 16.7% short of “Mission Accomplished”? Have we stayed the course, and may now leave Iraq? (Please remember to turn out the light at the end of the tunnel.)
Tris
That’s a pretty good bit of powerpoint, actually. [ul]
[li]Nice easy-to-understand “How fucked are we today” bar chart that communicates the absolute and relative state of fuckedness, as well as changes over time.[/li][li]Lists all the key components of the disaster and whether they are normal, bad, terrible or disastrous[/li][li]Tops it off with a ‘dreadful development of the week’ highlight.[/li][/ul]
I wish all our slides at work were that well put together, but I’m thankful that we don’t have that amount of bad news to communicate.
An interesting yet somewhat meaningless Powerpoint. It looks like something a management consultant might put together to help a company with their paradigm shift.
Basically assigning what appears to be quantitative measurements to unmeasureable qualities. What is a “chaos” index? How do we know if we are at 100% chaos or a mere 80% chaos.
I admit it. I don’t know whether they’re crunching thousands of calculations out of a computer, or prodding a monkey to pull numbered pieces of paper out of a hat, to generate the score. 
I would hope it’s more the former than the latter. It would be interesting to see how other countries would rank on this chart. The Us, Israel, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, to name a few.
