Month: November 2012

Book Review: Carnivores of the World

Author: Luke Hunter Illustrated by: Priscilla Barrett Publisher: Princeton University Press Book Review by: Paiso Jamakar Many of us learned in our high school biology courses that living things belong to either the animal or the plant kingdom. You may also recall classification of these kingdoms into phylum, class and order, and further breakdown into family, genus and species. Well, carnivores belong to the order Carnivora and there are 245 terrestrial species of them, belonging to 13 specific families: bears; cats; civets, along with genets and oyans; the African palm civet; dogs; fosa and allies; hyenas; linsangs; mongooses; raccoons;...

Read More

Book Review: Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools

Authors: Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica A. Hockett Publisher: Princeton University Press Book Review by: Nano Khilnani How can you give your child the best public high school education available in your state? By applying for him or her to get admission into one of the top 165 schools covered in this book, where some 100,000 students are enrolled. Note that they represent only seven-tenths of the top one percent of 22,368 total public high schools in the United States (2010 data). Twenty states do not have a single such top school. If you live in a state...

Read More

What is the Root of America’s No.1 Problem – Debt?

By Charles Goyette –Weiss Research Having a special time of year devoted to giving thanks is one of America’s finest traditions. I’ve always believed that blessings counted multiply. My wife and I make a practice of “doing our gratitude” every night, reviewing all the things for which we are grateful. But in addition to giving thanks, it is important to be clear-eyed and realistic about the things going on in the world around us. Let’s be frank. Over the last generation, Americans have become poorer. Meanwhile, the Chinese are becoming more-prosperous. Since the late 1970s, China’s GDP has grown...

Read More

Book Review: The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel

Author: Manu Joseph Publisher: W.W. Norton Book Review by:  Sonu Chandiram Manu Joseph is a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and is editor of Open, a magazine based in New Delhi. This is his second novel, with the first one, Serious Men, having won several awards, including the PEN Open Book Award and The Hindu Best Fiction Award. He is also a humorist. But I think he is naturally and honestly humorous. For example, in an interview piece that appeared in The Hindu on September 18, 2012, in an answer to a question, he writes in that article:...

Read More

Book Review: Iran Journal – An EMP Attack Would Cripple the United States !

By F. Michael Maloof WND Books A December 1998 Iranian military journal published an article titled “Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars,” and it detailed how an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack on the electronic infrastructure of the United States caused by the detonation of a nuclear bomb over the U.S. would be crippling. “Once you confuse the enemy communication network you can also disrupt the work of the enemy command- and decision-making center,” the journal said. “Even worse today when you disable a country’s military high command through disruption of communications, you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country. “If the world’s industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults then they will disintegrate within a few years,” the Iranian journal added. “American soldiers would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.” The journal went a step further in telling how an EMP attack on the U.S. electric infrastructure from the detonation of a nuclear bomb high above the U.S. would severely cripple the U.S. The Iranians, who do not yet have nuclear weapons but are working on it, learned about the effects of electromagnetic pulse attacks from the history of some of the first nuclear weapons tests conducted first by the United States in 1945 and...

Read More