The 230 million people of of Pakistan are living through an unprecedented disaster. By some accounts, one-third of their entire country has been flooded. The floods have torn through cities, valleys, housing complexes, and farms,often sweeping everything away. Uncounted thousands of people have been killed.Most …

Writing and publishing a printed and bound book is like sending a postcard into the future. (Just possibly, releasing digital materials has the same capability, but I’m not sure?) So here, on my desk, is a postcard from the end of the last century in the form of a copy…

It is a fact, that I find pretty damned tragic, that I haven’t written anything about the earth-shaking developments in Ukraine, since I wrote this piece on February 24. To be honest, most of that piece still holds up fairly well. So what happened was basically that, energized by the…

By launching a broad military campaign against Ukraine today, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has also launched a strong assault against the norms of the sovereignty-based “world order” that has been in place since 1945 — or even, one might say, since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Of course, the…

In 1511 CE, Portugal became the first of the European empires to establish a presence in East Asia. That was the year in which conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque established the first of the Portuguese empire’s characteristically heavily-armed trading/raiding outposts at Malacca, a strategic choke-point in today’s Malaysia that has always…