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Suggestions to the President

Sat, August 19, 2017 | 14:21

Opinion > Guest Column >

How to handle North Korea challenge

Last week the government of North Korea announced that it would launch Hwasong-14 missiles toward Guam, followed up by propaganda statements claiming Kim Jong-un had “reviewed their plan.” This is actually a very clever move on Pyongyang’s part. They have already declared that the firing of missiles (four) will be a demonstration - not an attack (the plan is for the missiles ...

Guest Column | 2017-08-18 17:12

CEO sings, writes songs, believes music is life

I have recently been asked what motivates me to write music and songs and perform them despite my very diverse and busy life as a senior Macquarie Group executive. It is an interesting question and one which, frankly, I had never thought about. Music is just something I do! However, now that I reflect on the question, I think for me that music and songwriting is, at its core,...

Guest Column | 2017-08-17 16:20

NK missile threats and Cold War lessons

The extreme, and some would add insane, regime in North Korea traditionally deploys far-out threatening rhetoric. Personal insults, bizarre accusations and apocalyptic images of destruction are all in a days’ broadcasting for this strange government. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been making specific nuclear threats against the island of Guam, a United States territory. President Donald Trump has responded with graphic warnings. Early in the year, Kim boasted Pyongyang now has an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), raising the nightmare specter of a nuclear attack on the United ...

Guest Column | 2017-08-17 16:17

Subconscious police

Silicon Valley tech companies are implementing mandatory "anti-bias retraining" programs in a collective effort to combat the prejudices supposedly hidden in their employees' subconscious. If that sounds Orwellian, it is because it is. Anti-bias retraining is a top-down intervention into people's thought lives, based on discredited science. And tech is far from the only industry to adopt such initiatives. If there were any evidence that unconscious bias influences people's actions, then perhaps a case for such measures might exist. But the behavioral effects of unconscious bias have been con...

Guest Column | 2017-08-16 17:39

From ex-US marine

If there is any people in the world to whom the people of the United States owe a duty, it is the Korean people. Twenty-five million North Koreans live under a repressive regime, believing their leader is divine, much like how the Shinto religion of Japan once believed in their emperor. Fifty million people live in South Korea, with perhaps 25 million within range of emplaced North Korean heavy artillery. The Korean Peninsula is almost equal in size to California. Its 38th parallel runs through Marin, Solano, San Joaquin and Mono counties. Its mountains, valleys and seacoast are fully as bea...

Guest Column | 2017-08-15 17:38

Awaiting construction revolution

LONDON - For 20 years, productivity in the global construction industry has grown at an annual rate of just 1%. Now, the industry needs to enter the twenty-first century, so that it can meet increasing demand for new structures and address the world’s growing housing and infrastructure gaps. The construction industry’s glacial pace of change is unlike that of other sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing, which have transformed their productivity performance over time. Between 1947 and 2010, US manufacturing achieved 760% cumulative real (inflation-adjusted) productivity growth, compar...

Guest Column | 2017-08-15 17:35

End to password frustration?

So now you tell us. In 2003, Bill Burr wrote the rules for password security for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, urging computer users to change passwords every 90 days and create such intricate passwords that even the world's fastest supercomputer would overheat trying to decipher them. Burr, however, recently confessed to The Wall Street Journal that this digital keyboard dance has caused endless frustration among us, the computer-using masses, in the name of online security. He is among a chorus of security experts who now say that a simple natural language senten...

Guest Column | 2017-08-15 17:34

Will US strike North Korea?

BEIJING - Donald Trump is running out of patience with North Korea. Using heated language unusual for a US president, Trump recently warned that if Pyongyang threatens to attack the United States again, the US will respond with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Whatever action Trump decides to take, he must recognize that the stakes - not just for the Korean Peninsula, but also for America’s relationship with China - could not be higher. North Korea’s two latest intercontinental ballistic missile tests, carried out last month, suggest that the country now has the capability to h...

Guest Column | 2017-08-14 18:00

Trump: Reagan gambit?

Last Sunday I wrote a piece on the political crisis in Venezuela. Then on Wednesday I wrote an article on Donald Trump’s hyperbolic language about North Korea. But it never occurred to me that the next article would be about Trump, North Korea AND Venezuela. I forgot about the Reagan Gambit. In October, 1983, US President Ronald Reagan had a little problem. A massive truck-bomb had killed 241 American Marines in their barracks at Beirut airport. That was more than a quarter of the total American force deployed as “peacekeepers” to Lebanon - a deployment that had already become controversial ...

Guest Column | 2017-08-14 17:08

Washington should step back in Korea

President Donald Trump has put all of Asia and much of the world on edge by going mano-a-mano with “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un. The former blusterer like the frightened head of an international micro-state instead of the representative of the world’s most important and powerful nation. There is no contest between the two countries. America’s GDP last year was almost $19 tril...

Guest Column | 2017-08-13 17:20

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Park's impeachment