Happy Thanksgiving!

There are so many things to be thankful for today:

• Friends and family.
  
• My friend Dhruv was not in Mumbai yesterday.
• The yummy deliciousness of Thanksgiving dinner.
• My new husband (almost 2 months!)
• My mother's return to health.
  

Things to acknowledge about the world's imperfection:

• Your family gathering will not be all harmony. It is simply not human nature for everyone to get along all the time.
• It makes me sad to think of the 100 families that are grieving today in India and wondering where this will lead.

Morning Brief

I'm going to tell you my secret source for valuable and important news: The Morning Brief by Foreign Policy magazine. You can sign up for a daily email here.

My only concern with spreading the word is that now you'll know where I get my material and I'll have to be more industrious from now on. ;-)

Iran Pictures

We don't get too many images of Iran other than political or religious leaders looking stern. I ran across this album of stunning pictures, primarily of architecture and women. It is beautiful.




Visiting Iran

New Projects

Today is a big day!
I gave my notice 2 weeks ago to the job that was sapping my strength and energy. Today is my first (week) day of freedom.
Part of my reason for leaving was that there are so many other things I want to get done which were impossible when my day was filled with doing things I didn't want to do.

So, the new mission:
Get a capital campaign going for my charter school
Write some articles exploring energy and policy
Explore some options of what I want to do in the next chapter of life
Get the body into shape - it's not getting any younger

And the difference is that all of these things sound exciting, interesting, like they'll give me energy rather than draining it all.

Illiberal Democracy

To borrow the title of Fareed Zakaria's book, the passage of Proposition 8 in California was a textbook case of what he called Illiberal Democracy. Direct democracy is usually not better democracy, especially when the majority is voting on rights for a minority. That is, instead, the tyranny of the majority.

Liberal democracy puts safeguards into place for the rights of minority groups. The State of California has failed its gay and lesbian citizens.

Confidence over Competence

I was always taught that if you don't know something that the best response is, "I don't know, but I'll look into it for you." And on the other hand, I've recently been told by my boss that I don't come across to the client with enough certitude about our solutions. I know enough to know that I don't know everything.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the crisis of too-much-confidence in our country and culture. It seeps into every corner of life, from business culture to politics.

Perhaps the greatest manifestation of this is George W. Bush, who didn't need to ask questions, get intelligence or see the other angle because of absolute confidence. Sarah Palin perhaps took this to such an extreme of Confidence over Competence that we'll pull back from this madness. When did confidence become the supreme virtue?

Well, here are a few words from a BBC news article, as well.

[L]ife's not like that and people know that. We know in our heart that it's not black and white ... and yet we pretend with the public that it's absolutely this policy and it will deliver what we want. Politics needs to change in that respect." But will it? Is it imaginable that a prime minister could stand up one day and say: "Look, I think this will work, and I'm going to give it a try, but frankly, I'm not sure."

Some parts of public life also function, less noisily, with subtlety and honesty about the real dilemmas. But we tend to hear less of them than the trumpet blasts of self-assurance. Is it the public that demands certainty, craving bedtime stories to help us sleep soundly rather than face up to the rather obvious fact that the future - and to some extent the present - is unknown? Or is it the fault of journalists who would rip into any minister who confessed to being unsure?

Some years ago, the former Archbishop of York John Hapgood suggested - with one eye on the politics of the time - that the lust for certainty could be a sin.

Slide show of Honeymoon pictures

Obama gets it!

There's speculation that Obama may appoint a Climate Czar, someone based at the White House who will be responsible to pulling together energy and the environment, as well as seeing the bigger picture on how this relates to the economy.

Hallelujah!

In no other country...

The fact that we elected Barack Obama last night is amazing, but let us also remember the magnificence of the American system of government.
As Obama has said from the beginning, "In no other country would my story be possible." And in addition, in very few other countries is a peaceful handover of power possible.

In an article discussing Kenya's declaration of a day of celebration (hey, how come we don't get a day off?), the following:

Tendai Biti, an opposition leader in Zimbabwe, said Obama's victory was inspiring and so was the concession by John McCain, whose fellow Republican George W. Bush will leave the White House on Jan. 20.
"If in Africa, incumbents would accept defeat and would graciously depart from the seat of power, this would be a different continent, and indeed Zimbabwe would be a different place," said Biti, whose party is deadlocked in power-sharing talks with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.