Playing Hardball in Government and Politics

David Starkey’s Magna Carta   59 minute stunning video on the history and contemporary significance of the Magna Carta. Click here: The Magna Carta by David Starkey   David Robert Starkey[nb 1] CBE, FSA, FRHistS (born 3 January 1945) is…

“Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty” — Daron Acemoglu

James A. Robinson, author of Why Nations Fail, talks at a Google Conference:  

Here’s how we fix it | Larry Lessig | TEDxMidAtlantic Lester Lawrence “Larry” Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School…

http://parkoffletter.com   An historical travel blog, where  you travel both in history and in place. It is not meant to be a Caribbean cruise but a true exploration of the past and the present. https://hardball.parkoffletter.org    American Constitutional Issues, the misuse of…

  Please follow this link to Psychiatric Drugs and Children

Dr. Tyrone Hayes’ Presentation at the 31st Annual National Pesticide Forum   2013 Forum: Protecting Life: From Research to Regulation (Tyrone Hayes) Silencing the Scientist: Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted By Herbicide Firm Syngenta Tyrone Hayes, Ph.D. Keynote talk: Learning…

entire book by David Landes on PDF: landes-the-wealth-and-the-poverty-of-nations

By DAVID S. LANDES W.W. Norton & Company Link to Original Article Chapter 1: Nature’s Inequalities Geography has fallen on hard times. As a student in elementary school, I had to read and trace maps, even draw them from memory.…

שמות פרק כג ח) ושחד לא תקח כי השחד יעור פקחים ויסלף דברי צדיקים And no bribery shall you take, for bribery blindeth those that see clearly and distorts the words of just men. (Exodus 23:8) דברים פרק טז ט)…

David Landes speaks:

Historian explored how cultural mores and historical circumstance intersected in economics August 30, 2013 By Peter Reuell, Harvard Staff Writer Email Twitter Facebook David S. Landes, a renowned historian whose work focused on the complex dynamics of cultural values, technological…

Latin America Latin America has had almost two hundred years of political independence to graduate to economic independence. It remains, however, a mixed area, wanting in local initiative, technologically patchy, entrepreneurially needy. This pattern of arrested development reflects the tenacious…

If we can learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference. (Here Max Weber was right on.) Witness the enterprise of expatriate minorities – the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia, Indians…

Why Industrial Revolution there and then? The question is really twofold. First, why and how did any country break through the crust of habit and conventional knowledge to this new mode of production? After all, history shows other examples of…

…do these Middle Eastern states need foreign investment? The best comparison is with sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain, cursed by easy riches and led down the path of self-indulgence and laziness. So with the oil-rich.  They have traded black gold for…

To understand the  rise and fall of empires, one must always look as much at the forces and circumstances of the home country as at conditions in the field. When the Portuguese conquered the South Atlantic, they were in the…

  Sir Edward Coke  (1552-1634) After the custom of the times, Coke wrote his Reports in Norman French, with pleadings entered in Latin. But the several Prefaces were, happily, in English, though tradition was served by printing the Latin beside…

From War is Boring –  a Devastating Critique Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter was developed in a breakneck 30 months by a close-knit team of 50 engineers led by an experienced fighter designer named Alan Brown and overseen by seven government…