In an interview last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the joint training exercise with South Korea planned just off the country's coast in the next few weeks represented only the "near-term piece" of a larger strategy to prevent a recurrence of the kind of shock the South experienced as it watched one of its ships sunk without warning.
Even before the Omand report, however, the JTAC was increasingly producing longer-term pieces.
"Because we won't have the need to generate page views for revenue, we can really focus on long-term pieces and not the news at all," Altman explains.
I attended the Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair in London last September and discovered some rather unusual objects that gave the term "conversation piece" a whole new meaning.
As long as it's recognised as an umbrella term, a piece of shorthand, there doesn't seem to be too much to worry about.
But if the 40% long-term bond piece of the portfolio is shifted so that 35% of it is in short-term bonds and 5% is in small value stocks, the portfolio's overall return would increase to 10.6%, all with a hair less volatility.
The top-heavy bureaucratic demands of cultural corporations, hungry for sponsorship, frantic for budget, pitching for dollar, Euro and yen, make any short-term performance piece difficult to stage.
In broadest terms, the piece is an examination of the struggle of two races to coexist in a world neither wants to leave, of the compromises accepted by both sides, of the narrowness of some parishioners and the bigheartedness of others.
Ironically, in journalistic terms these piece are what some (or at least those of us have been doing this for a while) call 'bread and butter' journalism, something that was often considered, well, a chore.
In broad terms, a piece of it has to be shared history and another piece has to be shared interests.
