Archives for the month of: July, 2009

The fashion designer, Issey Miyake, who is a good friend of my family, has an anti-nuclear weapons op-ed in the New York Times.

If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.

Op-Ed Contributor – A Flash of Memory – NYTimes.com

The Michael Lewis piece in VF on Joseph Cassano and AIG Financial Products is finally out on the web.

And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer.

The Man Who Crashed the World

Highly recommended reading.

Good overview of the upcoming election in Japan in Foreign Policy by Tobias Harris.

The Inept Captain of a Sinking Ship: The rise and fall of Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, and his party.

Highly recommended.

For those of you who were frustrated by the fact that Rolling Stone’s website does not have the full text of the recent Matt Taibbi missive on Goldman Sachs, the text of that article has been scanned and OCRed and posted to Somethingawful. I highly recommend reading it.
Someone has to do a wiki or page that lists all the ex-Goldman Sachs executives who are running either key American businesses (like Liddy at AIG) or key US government positions (too many to list.) Clearly Goldman Sachs is too influential and has influence that it should not have with the US government. If there’s a company that is worth investigating for being either too big to fail or controlling the markets, it is clearly Goldman Sachs.

APA Magazine has a great in-depth, two-part interview with John Cho who is one of the only high-profile Asian-American actors working in the industry today. I hope Cho has a long and exciting career ahead of him as it is great to see an actor like him on the stage of today.
The Game-Changer: An Interview with John Cho
The Game-Changer: An Interview with John Cho (part 2)
via Angry Asian Man