One brief correction, Tom. On the accusation of being "short," Modelski
and Thompson took the long plunge at the last ISA (while you were
enjoying yourself in SE Asia) and presented a paper on long-term
diffusion processes which empirically was probably Sumercentric as much
as anything else since we started in 3500 BCE. So now we are among the
long category but still disagreeing with other long-term perspectives. WRT