In the 3rd Presidential debate, both President Obama and Governor Romney spoke of Afghanistan in a futuristic past tense. They promised that America will leave Afghanistan in 2014. No one should be surprised. Literally every one in America is fed up with that conflict. And no one believes there is any real value in that…
The New York Times is a great newspaper, probably the best newspaper in the world. It publishes superb, well researched articles about major issues. That doesn’t mean it is perfect. For example, we have compared the NYT with France. Like France, we wrote, the NYT has made significant contributions to intellectual thought and it practices…
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, the Prince of European diplomats, was famous for saying “speech was given to us to to conceal our thoughts“. Words can sound wonderful, they can promise so much, they can obfuscate and deceive. This is why a picture is judged better than a thousand words. In geostrategy, maps take the place…
Editor’s Note: In this series of articles, we include important or interesting videoclips with our comments. This is an article that expresses our personal opinions about comments made on Television and in Print. It is NOT intended to provide any investment advice of any type whatsoever. No one should base any investing decisions or conclusions…
Think about it. We all recognize that people with legacies get an unfair advantage in life. Successful societies recognize this, successful institutions recognize this. That’s why programs that create diversity, that encourage people without legacies are the norm today. Well, I think such programs are too narrow in their scope. That is because the programs…
Sometimes you just need to watch and listen. This Presidential election turned when Mitt Romney showed who he is in the first Presidential debate. All summer, the Obama campaign had painted a caricature of Romney. That was revealed as propaganda in the first debate. The pandits are now comparing this election with the Carter-Reagan…
Editor’s Note: In this series of articles, we include important or interesting videoclips with our comments. This is an article that expresses our personal opinions about comments made on Television and in Print. It is NOT intended to provide any investment advice of any type whatsoever. No one should base any investing decisions or conclusions…
Our basic tenet is that ignorance breeds supremacism and that, taken to a high level, leads to institutionalized racism. Such a mindset, when unchecked and unopposed, can lead to serious problems between communities, religions, societies and nations. This article discusses such a mindset, an institutionalized way of thinking that seems perfectly correct, moral from one…
Shashi is an Indian homemaker with a loving husband and two children in an Indian city. She makes wonderful laddoo, an Indian sweet delicacy that you have to eat to understand its magic. She runs a small business making laddoos and delivering them to her customers. Her husband laughingly tells friends “My wife, she was…
Last week, we described the “intellectual attention” showered on Pankaj Mishra’s new book From the Ruins of the Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. As we wrote last week, this book is mainly an expression of the author’s rage about Asia being a failure despite the intellectualism the author ascribes it to. This week, we…