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Tom Plate

Tom Plate, distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, is the Pacific Century Institute's vice-president. His first book ― "Understanding Doomsday, on the nuclear arms race" ― was published in 1971. His article was distributed by the South China Morning Post.

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Tom Plate

Craze About Derivatives

By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles Director of Asia Pacific Media Network LOS ANGELES _ Although Warren Buffet does have _ I reluctantly admit - more money than I do (like maybe $50 or so billion more, shall we guess?), we do share a pair of traits in common. The first is that this internationally famous investment banker (known here as the ``Sage of Omaha") tends to favor more cautious, carefully considered kinds of investments. So do I. But my caution is more like investment laziness: I prefer not to have to worry about what my money is doing when I am trying awfully hard to do a decent job as a professor, a columnist, a husband and a book writer. Sure, if I had absolutely nothing better to do with my time than to worry about money 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I might be a lot less lazy about how I invest what little of it that I have _ and then I might have a lot more to invest, right? Or _ the way the markets have been misbehaving lately _ I might just as well wind up with less, a lot less. The second commonality between W

Aug 16, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

taliban Hostages Held to Dumb Ideology

By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, LA Director of Asia Pacific Media Network LOS ANGELES _ It is the useful, results-oriented, down-to-earth philosophy known as pragmatism that tends to reveal America at its best. Rather than hiding behind the skirt of airy ideology for fear of facing reality, pragmatism takes the world as we find it and proposes to work with it in a useful way. William James, the great American philosopher, was perhaps our most famous modern proponent of pragmatism. His ideas were a gift to the world, as well. From him we are inspired to understand that little gets done unless you actually try to do it. Obviously. Instead of standing on ideological ceremony _ of whatever political, religious or ethnic justification _ we are almost always better off trying to work things out, not just with those with whom we agree but far more importantly with those with whom we do not. A great contemporary example of abstract principle getting in the way of real-world needs is the hostage crisis in Afghanistan. The fact is that the world _ and th

Aug 8, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

Absurdities Hard to Understand

By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles Director of Asia Pacific Media Network LOS ANGELES _ Sometimes the news is so absurd, you wonder how the world can stay glued together much longer. Three recent examples struck me as almost iconic. From Japan: Wont’t they ever learn? The thing almost everyone fears about the nuclear-power industry around the world is that it’s mainly run by dishonest creeps who would let radioactivity secretly spill over onto a nearby orphanage run by Mother Theresa as long as they could keep it from the press. And so just when you think clean-energy nuclear power is starting to come into its own, some nuclear-power idiots come along with a big P.R. blunder and play into the hands of the knee-jerk anti-nuclear power ideologues. This recently happened in Japan. Radioactive spills from the Kashiwazaki nuke plant were reported, but the gravity of the leakage was purposely downsized to the news media and the public by the power execs. Turns out, there was much more spilled radioactive water than first reported, and there

Jul 26, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

Moritas of Japan and China

By Tom Plate Los Angeles - Long before just about everyone and his uncle began throwing around the term ``brand'' and ``branding'' as if they had personally invented it, a visionary from Japan was actually doing some big-time branding of his own instinct. The brand under his renown became internationally famous as SONY, and as long as Akio Morita was to have anything to say about it, that brand was going to be synonymous with state-of-the-science consumer electronics - at its very ``ichiban'' best. When Morita died in Tokyo in 1999, everyone knew that an era had ended; what was unclear was whether the death of this princely potentate and SONY co-founder (in 1946) would auger the decline of the brand itself. That prospect is still unclear. But though SONY does seem to be stumbling of late, what's certain is that it was people like Morita - not to mention other Japanese branding giants of the 20th century like Soichiro Honda and Kiichiro Toyoda - who made the world's consumers stop laughing when a product for sale was labeled ``Made in Japan.'' They certainly stopped laugh

Jul 22, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

Toast to Remarkable Success

By Tom Plate HONG KONG _ China is to vigorous public debate and extensive civic participation as the moon is to water, night is to day and cats are to dogs, right? If absolutely so, then what in the world possessed veteran U.S. diplomat James Cunningham to say the following _ in public no less _ about a prominent part of China that (and I quote): ``… remains a model of Chinese society that observes the rule of law, follows free and fair market principles, allows unfettered entrepreneurial activity, and respects freedom and human rights, including religious freedom. Its political system is evolving, and public participation in civic affairs is growing.’’ What was American Consul General Cunningham smoking when he said this? Maybe there needs to be a U.S. congressional investigation of this silly little career foreign service officer, eh? Or maybe we Americans ought to get off our high ideological horses and actually visit the Special Administrative Region of China known as Hong Kong and see for ourselves. That’s right _ it’s part of China, it’s nothing like Beijing, and

Jul 2, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

HK’s Media: Not Dead Yet!

By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles Director of Asia Pacific Media Network Hong Kong _ Not every place in the word takes its news media seriously, to say the least. Some governments view it as a nuisance, if not a menace; others as an arm of public instruction, if not propaganda. But this is not the view taken here, in what (since the handover from Britain in 1997) is officially called the Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. Here in what everyone else calls Hong Kong, the news media is taken very seriously indeed. In fact, this would increasingly appear to be the case. Notwithstanding all the dire predictions that absorption into media-repressive China would eventually castrate the feisty local press, the Hong Kong media has at least held its own. Newspapers still bash the central government (though avoiding whenever possible the question of Taiwan, whose occasional feints toward official independence terrorize Beijing). And TV and radio, especially, still operate with a measure of abandon. Political debate remai

Jun 29, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

How to Understand China

By Tom Plate LOS ANGELES _ America needs more people like Prof. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a heretofore humble academic here on the West Coast. Let me explain. Understanding China is going to remain irritatingly difficult. It’s an obviously important but intensely problematic place, with a possibly fabulous or possibly tragic future. We maybe have a better shot figuring out the future of India _ or even Mars _ than China. If we leave the job of thinking about China to our general mass news media, we will wind up with mainly superficial portraits of that part of China that’s most visible to the eye and to the camera, while losing all sight and sense of that part of China that is clandestine _ or at least well beneath the surface. The downside of a gross misunderstanding looms ever more significant almost every time we look over our shoulder _ and see China coming on strong, economically as well as militarily. The latest trade figures themselves are cause to lose one’s breath. Get this: The mainland’s trade surplus for May increased by 73 percent compared to a year ago. The

Jun 15, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

Newspapers: Read All About It

By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles Director of Asia Pacific Media Network LOS ANGELES _ On arrival one night in India, I telephoned downstairs to the hotel’s Concierge Desk to ask for newspapers to be delivered in the morning. The voice at the other end paused, noticeably, not wanting to insult the guest or suggest he’d lost his mind. “Sir,” he said, “there are many Indian papers, in English and in Hindi.” I explained that the English-language ones would work best for me, miserable non-bilingual that I am. “But,” he continued, “there are so many!” I told him to send up every English paper he had. The gentle Concierge at the lovely Sheraton Maurya Hotel in New Delhi probably put me down as just another crazy, pampered American tourist. The truth is, I am in fact crazy _ but just for newspapers. Always have been, and always will be. And so the wealth of interesting newspapers in India is delightfully staggering, despite the country’s struggle with poverty, the caste system, communal tensions, Pakistan and well _ it’s a long list. My hotel served

Jun 7, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

About Addiction Theory

By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles Director of Asia Pacific Media Network LOS ANGELES _ Addictions can be frighteningly habit-forming, by very definition. That should be universally obvious, whether you follow the substance-abusing celebrity circuit in India, where I was recently visiting, or the substance-abusing celebrity circuit in Los Angeles, where I live and work. What’s not so obvious is that a universal consensus on the true nature of substance abuse and addiction looks not to exist. Just before I left India, a famous former Indian test bowler had been arrested for possessing a small amount of cocaine. His name is Maninder Singh, who reinvented himself into a very popular radio and television cricket commentator. The former star athlete admitted to police that he’d been using cocaine for years to “cope with family problems.” Also arrested with Singh was an Indian cricket coach for hashish possession. At roughly the same time here in Los Angeles, in the general area of what we Angelenos refer to as “Hollyweird,” an internationally

Jun 4, 2007By Tom Plate
Tom Plate

Soul of India

By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles Director of Asia Pacific Media Network NEW DELHI _ If you want to understand as much as possible about India in a single day, maybe the best way to go is to take the slow bus to Agra. And by slow, I mean slow as in the speed of a backlash of taffy. There are no fast buses to Agra because the road more resembles a war-zone in which countless people seem to be fleeing somewhere for their life. Someday _ yes, some day _ the new highway will be up and running, but who knows how long that will take? It sometimes seems as if India goes out of its way to be inefficient. Most people go to Agra to get to the justly famed and fabulous Taj Mahal. From New Delhi that’s about a four-hour trip. The journey itself is worth at least as much as the destination. India itself is too great to rush through even if that were remotely possible. India is often touted as the next slam-dunk superpower, after emerging China and of course, the established United States. The big build-up mainly comes from the Western media, especially

Jun 1, 2007By Tom Plate
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