The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It's useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some...
When you're lucky enough to get paid a nice chunk of change to write a movie or a TV show, you have no right to complain, really. I guess it's more of an appeal to the powers that be that the less they interfere, the more likely, actually, they are t...
As an older dad who grew up in a rural culture in the South, certain things were expected of women, and that included raising the children. But I think it's just as important for the father to give the baths, to hug, to change the diapers, to tell th...
In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
We have little choice but to place a certain level of trust in scientists - even when it comes to the model-driven speculative discipline of climate change. And, need it be said, most scientists take great care in being honest, principled and precise...
I was away from the front lines for a while this spring, living with other troops, and considerable fighting took place while I was gone. When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front I wondered if I would sense any change in them.
The one big, humongous, immense thing that we didn't change, that we didn't figure out how to deal with is, if men and women are both going to work throughout their lives, who's going to take care of the kids?
Anything that we do to make ourselves feel worthy and safe is a flight from the pain of powerlessness. Every pursuit of external power - every attempt to change the world or a person in order to make yourself feel valuable and safe - is a distraction...
There is no other way to change something or someone for the better except to occupy it first. The only person you can occupy is yourself. That is why the only person who can change you for the better is you. Without your decision to change and your ...
Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system...
I am not deeply involved in Australian politics but I know there are prime ministers, governments around the world who are not acting responsibly in relation to climate change.
Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of ina...
In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculatio...
But you're never taught in schools - we don't teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don't teach anyone in college that government is the problem - except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstr...
There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.
For 30 years I've been schooled in everything from government, and economics, to medicine and international relations. But don't be impressed. Someone once said being a general assignment reporter simply means you are equally ignorant about most ever...
One of the extraordinary features of the Blair government has been its slavish support for the central tenets of Bush's foreign policy - above all, the war in Iraq. During the Cold War, the Wilson government resisted the suggestion that it should sen...
I had this fantasy that in a democracy the government was the population. So I came to America and got a big slap in my face... Americans were not what I thought. I thought I was going to see bastards and I saw nice people, very friendly to me.
One side of the American psyche wants smaller government, lower taxes, and more choices for individuals, even if those choices increase risk. The other wants a strong social safety net to protect the weakest among us, even if it costs more to minimiz...
Real prosperity comes from everybody in the country working together in a growth mode. Real prosperity comes as a result of people's own initiative and efforts and so forth. Prosperity, if it comes from the government, is not prosperity. It's an exis...
Right after September 11, 2001, there weren't really any blogs in China, but there were a lot of Chinese chatrooms - and there were a lot of conversations in which Chinese netizens were saying things like, 'served them right.' That was definitely not...
