Money
From the very start, England s 17th century colonies in America had a problem – a shortage of coins
[T01] The British idea was to grow large amounts of tobacco, cut timber for the ships of their global navy and merchant marine, and so forth, sending in return the supplies they felt were needed to keep the Americans working. In effect, early colonists were supposed to both work for the company and shop at the company store. The investors and the Crown much preferred this to paying in coin what the farmers might ask, letting the farmers themselves buy the supplies – and, heaven forbid, keep some of the profit as well.
The ongoing India-China face-off in Eastern Ladakh may appear to be a small-scale confrontation between conventional forces. But it is still one between nuclear-armed states, and the threat of escalation cannot be denied. In its wake, India has carried out a series of missile tests, while China too has fired a number of ballistic missiles near the Paracel and Spratly Islands, apparently to warn the US, but hardly something New Delhi can ignore. This analysis makes three key points: the threat from China is likely to persist; India needs to adapt balancing responses to the threat to the requirements of a nuclear weapons environment; and Indian policymakers should be mindful of the possibilities of actual military combat, be it a marginal war, or a trans-domain conflict that involves use of advanced technologies influencing both the nuclear and conventional spheres.
JEA: almost every serious journalist and writer now believes that Israel was behind the death of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeth. But that would almost certainly have been impossible if the United States and other US allies were putting pressure on Israel. In fact, one can say that the death of Fakhrizadeth was invariably a gift from the United States. Why?
The United States has been giving Israel at least 3 billion dollars every single year, and with Trump on the throne, the Israelis have been able to do just about anything they wanted. It was Trump himself who literally destroyed the peace deal Obama established with the Iranians.
Dec 19, 2020
As 2021 approaches, six Japan Times book reviewers look back on their top reads released in English this year.
Breasts and Eggs, Fiction, Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett and David Boyd), Picador, 432 pages
If you missed “Breasts and Eggs,” Mieko Kawakami’s expansive and lively omnibus, put it at the top of your 2021 reading list.
The book is made up of two connected novellas that were combined and translated into English this year, and together the story explores the human condition by examining what it means to be born. No one delves into humanity quite like Kawakami, who adroitly balances social issues with humor and juxtaposes philosophical questions with streetwise answers. Kawakami’s sprawling, soaring, sometimes stumbling prose always rights itself into a sly meditation on human flaws and fallacies, taking on single motherhood, social isolation, gender norms and sexual abuse.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp xx + 295, ₹
895.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp xxiv + 577, price not indicated.
Asia’s Journey to Prosperity: Policy, Market, and Technology Over 50 Years by Asian Development Bank,
Manila: ADB, 2020 (ebook), http://dx.doi.org/10.22617/TCS190290.
The transformation of Asia from its status as the most impoverished region to the growth locomotive of the world economy within five decades is unprecedented and nothing short of a miracle. The achievement seems all the more profound when juxtaposed with a very pessimistic outlook of Asia’s development prospects made by Gunnar Myrdal in his three-volume tome
Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968.