Kamran > Recent Status Updates

The king of France gave away commercial rights in exchange for private sector support of missions to settle and colonize, which resulted in a conflict of motive inherent to each colonial operation.

If the rough patch lasts long enough, though, you may find yourself in a dreaded situation in which problems compound, then congeal into a broader narrative about you and your presidency. The negative stories don't let up, which leads to a drop in your popularity. Your political adversaries, smelling blood in the water, go after you harder, and allies aren't as quick to defend you.

I was left with an impression that would become all too familiar in my dealings with aging autocrats: shut away in palaces, their every interaction mediated by the hard-faced obsequious functionaries that surrounded them, they were unable to distinguish between their personal interests and those of their nations, their actions governed by no broader purpose beyond maintaining the tangled web of patronage...

The absence of catastrophe, the preservation of normalcy, wouldn't attract attention. Most of the people impacted wouldn't even know how our policies had touched their lives.

Iowa may have convinced me and my team that I could end up being president. But it was the New Hampshire loss that made us confident that I'd be up to the job.

A budget reserve is to contractors as red meat is to lions, and they will devour it.

"To the untrained eye," Feller remarks, "randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."

"The fact that major American chipmakers were embroiled in intellectual property lawsuits with Japanese rivals was interpreted as evidence that Silicon Valley was still well ahead.

"The fact that major American chipmakers were embroiled in intellectual property lawsuis with Japanese rivals was interpreted as evidence that Silicon Valley was still well ahead.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew?

The family, I believed, had the greatest influence on a child’s values in the first 12 to 15 years of life. Sound values, if rooted early in life, could later resist contrary influences and pressures. Roman Catholic priests, if entrusted with a child for the first 12 years of its life, could usually ensure the child would remain Catholic for life.

"I was convinced our people must never have an aid-dependent mentality. If we were to succeed we had to depend on ourselves."

No wonder with thoughts like these Singapore has been able to transform itself into a first-world country!

Time and again, Pakistani politicians have demonstrated selfishness and short-termism (getting immediate gains but suffering from greater long-term loss) at the the expense of the country.

For example, Article 58(2)(b) of the Constitution had always hung like a loose sword over political governments. Yet, PPP (Benazir Bhutto) and PML-N (Nawaz Sharif) didn't fix it when given power to do so.

(Re Islander Mirza's & Ayub Khan's coup d'etat)

In the leading judgement, Chief Justice Munir held that a victorious revolution and a successful coup d'etat is an internationally recognized legal method of changing a constitution.

The combined petroleum earnings of the oil exporters rose from $23 billion in 1972 to $140 billion by 1977.

This line from the book is truly reminiscent of the present day manias.

A parcel of land in Pithole that sold for $2 million in 1865 was auctioned for for $4.37 in 1878.