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A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
"you return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?"
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Yet the Russian Federation—Russia—still looms over the newly independent states. It sprawls across the map, encompassing eleven time zones from Europe in the west to the tip of the Chukotka Peninsula in the Far East, just sixty miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Its population is only half that of the Soviet Union, and in 2019, its economy was only slightly larger than Spain’s—although Spain has only a third of the population and ceased being a great power in the eighteenth century. Yet Russia still has formidable accoutrements of power. It has scale. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles and considerable cyber skills. It has the determination to project itself on the world stage. And it has natural resources—particularly vast amounts of oil and gas that underpin its place in the world.
The New Map
Daniel Yergin
It turned out that the Chinese Communist Party didn’t turn to its CDC to lead the response; they turned instead to the military. More worrying, Chinese officials didn’t feel a strong imperative to keep their own public health agencies informed of events. Through December, information on the outbreak was widely shared with the medical branches of the Chinese military, but not with China’s CDC, according to US health officials I spoke with who were in contact with their Chinese counterparts. One illuminating fact: the Chinese authorities sent the head of their biowarfare program to Wuhan to oversee the response. In the US, we were misled by a belief that China’s effort would conform to the type of response that many US public health officials would have envisioned, with public health institutions taking the lead. China’s CDC was largely sidelined.
Uncontrolled Spread
Scott Gottlieb
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