Are there still people in the world today who speak the truth to those in power who lie? This might seem a not unreasonable conclusion from two recent articles in the Times. First, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a widely respected founding member of the present Iranian religious hierarchy, is mounting his own verbal [...]
Archive for November 2009
Talk the talk, but not yet walk the walk
November 22, 2009Michael Porter on strategic thinking
November 17, 2009Well over one year ago Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School outlined what he thought were the sources of our country’s exceptional prosperity. The U.S. has prospered, he said, because of a “set of unique competitive strengths.” These were: an unparalleled environment for entrepreneurship, for starting new companies. an entrepreneurship fed by a science, [...]
The Exceptional Nation
November 9, 2009Much has been written about America, the exceptional nation. And if there is one thing that makes us exceptional among all the world’s nations it must be the sort of thing I read about in today’s NYTimes, in an article entitled, Boy Who Fled Vietnam War Returns as U.S. Officer. Justin Mott for The New [...]
War and Newton’s First Law of Motion
November 8, 2009Why are we still at great material and personal cost to ourselves continuing to send our sons and daughters to fight, and, for some, to die in Afghanistan? Googling does turn up a number of answers, but none of them are convincing, no more than the domino theory ever satisfactorily explained our decision to remain [...]
Guest Columnist, Ardeshir Cowasjee, writing in Dawn
November 5, 2009[Those who continue to insist that government is the problem, that less government is better (and no government best of all), might read the following piece by Ardeshir Cowasjee in order to soften their own anti-government hard line, realizing perhaps that in some instances government is absolutely necessary and essential, and that the lack of [...]
A Modest Proposal for Handling the Differences Among School Children
November 1, 2009We’ve only recently moved to Tampa, about a year ago to be exact when we moved into our son’s house while our new home was being significantly renovated for our own purposes. Now it’s completed, but we’re still moving in, taking things out of hundreds of boxes as spaces are prepared for them. Books in [...]
