M. Orhan Tarhan
Mr. M. Orhan Tarhan is a Turkish-American who was educated in Turkey, in Germany, and in the U.S. as a chemical engineer. For 30 years he worked as a research engineer, perfecting the art of studying new subjects. During the last 40 years he developed a manuscript on the "Art of Living", which he has now updated and re-edited.
He publishes the "Orhan Tarhan Letter" that is distributed by e-mail twice a month. This article is taken from the Letter 156.Mr. Tarhan believes that the only life we have is worth improving to make us happier.
He will appreciate comments by readers.
PLEASE ATTACH THIS BIOGRAPHY TO THE LAST ARTICLES I SUBMITTED. SORRY IT ESCAPED MY ATTENTION.
Send your comments to the email link below.
He publishes the "Orhan Tarhan Letter" that is distributed by e-mail twice a month. This article is taken from the Letter 156.Mr. Tarhan believes that the only life we have is worth improving to make us happier.
He will appreciate comments by readers.
PLEASE ATTACH THIS BIOGRAPHY TO THE LAST ARTICLES I SUBMITTED. SORRY IT ESCAPED MY ATTENTION.
Send your comments to the email link below.
Articles by M. Orhan Tarhan
July 17, 2009
Controlling our life depends, first of all, on the person we want to control, namely ourselves. The kind of person we are, our character, our normal behavior, our general education, and a number of other things will determine whether we are easy to control or not. But we are who we are, and we canno...
July 01, 2009
P R E F A C E
As far as we know, we live only once. Therefore it stands to reason that we should make the best of it. That is the subject of these articles.
Living can be made into an art by knowing as much as possible about it and by being able to contr...
June 20, 2009
About a week ago, at the Outlook Section of Washington Post Mr. Gorbatchev had an interesting article. He said that the financial crisis here and worldwide shows that it is now time we should make changes in our capitalist system. He was polite enough not to say what these changes should be.
...
June 04, 2009
This is a fictitious story that happened in the year 2050, that has great relevance to events of 2009.
In the year2019 United States and NATO forces had finally totally defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The hard corps Taliban that was still alive was thrown out of that region. ...
May 16, 2009
Afghanistan is a mountainous country of uneducated Muslim inhabitants that was of no great importance to the United States until 9/11. When it became obvious that the Taliban was protecting Osama bin Laden, it suddenly became very important.
The Bush Administration sent a few hundred troops to h...
May 16, 2009
Pakistan is now the most burning and the most dangerous foreign policy problem faced by the Obama government. We must understand the problem, we must define it correctly so that we may come up with the correct policies.
What kind of people are the Pakistanis? Some British-educated people are go...
April 14, 2009
The improvement of education should not be left totally to schools. It should start at home. Parents should be interested in their children´s education. They should follow up their progress, and when it is stalled, they should get busy and solve their children´s problems.
The American Child´s h...
April 14, 2009
President Bush has used the 9/11 event for a pretext to attack Iraq. After a brief operation in Afghanistan, he put it on the back burner and concentrated American forces on Iraq. That gave the Taliban a chance to resurrect and present serious danger to the NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Recen...
April 14, 2009
President Obama visited Turkey at the end of his visits to a number of European countries. His popularity among Turks was 52 % , a huge improvement over 12 % popularity of America at the period of President George W. Bush. President Obama made an important speech at the Turkish Grand National Ass...
February 06, 2009
President Obama requested that we, the citizens, suggest ideas of change for him to consider. This is a response to that request.
Former president George W. Bush made many decisions based on religious considerations. His faith-based politics at home are a good example. These were perfectly unco...
January 21, 2009
Last articles on the cost of universities have generated considerable interest on elementary, middle, and high school education. I wrote four articles on this subject since the beginning of these LETTERS. I want to summarize them here for the benefit of new readers.
The aim of education in Turke...
January 10, 2009
It was reported on December 3, 2008 in the media that the costs of the universities have been rising at more than twice the rate as the cost of living. Thus, universities are no longer affordable. If nothing is done, the cost will be prohibitive, but still more people will apply and will keep them...
December 03, 2008
Turkey is a "laic" republic. Laic is not the same thing as "secular". Turkey has no national religion. Its constitution does NOT say that "Turkey´s religion is Islam", although 98 % of its people are Muslim. Religion and state affairs are sharply separated and religion has no place in the publ...
November 09, 2008
This article discusses how one decides for whom to vote. Every voter oat to have some basic principles on how the government should be run. I believe that a government should be run rationally, secularly, problems should be solved privately, using a minimum of government, but defensive organs of t...
October 18, 2008
Problems and crises must be solved all the way to their roots, not superficially. Otherwise, they will recur with a vengeance. I do not see this being done in the present crisis. The two presidential candidates do not convince me that they really understand what is going on. The people who are tell...
October 01, 2008
In the past, cities on the Gulf coast and on the Atlantic shore were hit by hurricanes once in ten or twenty years and were rebuilt. The destruction was not all that much, and taking this kind of risk was not unreasonable.
With the change of climate, the hurricanes became monstrous things that can ...
September 14, 2008
Turkey and Greece were invited at the same time to join the Common Market, which later became the European Union (EU). Greece accepted the invitation and is now one of the states of the EU. Bulent Ecevit, a Social Democrat, was the Turkish Prime minister at that time. He declined, saying that "Turk...
September 14, 2008
Ataturk´s regime converted Ottoman Turks with 7 % literacy in 15 years to an independent democratic republic with much higher literacy, emancipated its women, and gave them the right to elect and be elected.
It changed its alphabet to a Latin alphabet, put its children in secular schools wh...
July 14, 2008
Thomas L. Friedman wrote an important article in the New York Times on June 29 titled "Anxious in America" in which he told us all the wrong things in this country in politics, economics, finance, and energy. However, he did not suggest any solutions to these problems. Most of them are subjects th...
July 05, 2008
I have the habit of defining first what I will be talking about. But in this case, I will make an exception for capitalism, because it is the system we are using. My readers don´t need to read a definition of capitalism. But I think, I need to define greed: "it is an excessive desire for mo...
June 15, 2008
About a year ago I wrote an article (No. 109) , in which I explained how congressmen, senators, and even presidents need money for being elected, that they get it a little bit from us the voters, and mostly from corporations and special interests. By doing so, the corporations earn their loyalty, ...
June 04, 2008
Last January I wrote an article titled: "America´s Energy Future". That article became the most read of my articles published in American Chronicles. I am happy to find out that our people are interested in Energy. After all, at this time, this is the biggest problem the World ever faced.
...
May 15, 2008
This article is devoted to fooling examples provided by my readers. I received three such examples and I am publishing all three of them. I thank very much to these readers.
In my recent article titled "We are still at war against Bin Laden", I had said that President Gorge W. Bush fooled the...
May 02, 2008
In the previous LETTER it was explained how the Bush Administration fooled the American people about the Iraq War and it was pretty successful at it. It fooled the entire Congress first. Many people here still don´t see the light. Unfortunately, the policy of fooling the people is not limited...
April 14, 2008
Following the destruction of the twin Trade Towers in New York by the Arabs who are accepting the distorted Bin Laden version of Islam, the United States responded correctly and sent military forces to Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban which had sponsored the attacks. The Taliban was defeated with...
April 02, 2008
No, this is not a mistake. I do not want to talk about the damages done by the Islamists. I wrote enough about those damages. Today I want to write about what the socialists did and are still doing to Turkey.
Beginning immediately after the Second World War, the show windows of Turkish bookstore...
March 16, 2008
Coal has been the major energy source for industry, transportation, and chemistry for several centuries. The more recent advent of petroleum was an energy source easier to handle and it was cheaper. Of course, distilled or chemically or catalytically treated products of petroleum could be used in ...
March 12, 2008
On February 9, 2008 the Turkish Parliament in Ankara changed the Turkish constitution, the part that could not be changed, even the part that cannot be discussed. They lifted the ban on wearing head scarves or turbans at the universities. This was a strong blow on the laic character of the constit...
February 05, 2008
Our way of electing our President of the United States leaves a lot to be desired. It takes too long, we are spending a ridiculous amount of money for it, and we still are not always getting the quality people we should get.
This complaint is not new. I remember the election of Goldwater versus...
January 19, 2008
America´s foreign policy has been for decades determined by its need for energy. Today U.S. troops are in Irak for the same reason. The Bush Administration would get us entangled with Iran, if it could, for the same reason. The Iraq war, which is approaching five years, has cost us over $20...
January 03, 2008
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was undoubtedly a great soldier, a great national leader, and a genius of a politician, all rolled in one. There are many other great soldiers and leaders in history, but no one else ever transformed his nation from a backward, ignorant, and poor society to modern-minded, acti...
December 23, 2007
In the previous letter we discussed “The Importance of Laicism For Turkey” We will be surprised to find out that this importance does not seem to be understood by the friends of Turkey.
Of course, in today’s transparent world, the whole world sees Turkey’s problems. It would make sense that th...
December 02, 2007
In this country most people do not understand what Laicism is. Many believe it is the same thing as secularism.. This has very serious consequences. Let us first define properly these two concepts.
During the last 400 years Europe fought religious wars: the 30-Year-War, the 100-Year War, many ma...
November 20, 2007
Turkey is being attacked by the PKK terrorists, who are being protected by the Bush Administration in North Iraq. This may lose Turkey’s friendship at a time when Russia is becoming a new Cold War adversary. Such a blunder should be prevented.
During the Cold War, Turkey staunchly defended the W...
November 02, 2007
During the last weeks the majority of columnists in Turkish papers wrote almost continuously on Turkey’s PKK problem, because it was Turkey’s most serious problem. In this article, I want to define the problem from different points of view and search for an outcome that would constitute a solution ...
October 18, 2007
Aldous Huxley’s book “Brave New World” was an utopia first published in 1932. It described a society existing “700 years after Ford”, that produced its people, not by sex, as it is still usual now a days, but by mass incubation of human eggs (?) . The society consisted of four working classes ...
October 16, 2007
It is not easy to predict the future of any country, even those that are stable like the United States and Canada. It is a lot more risky to try to predict the future of a fast changing country as Turkey. That is why the adjective “probable” in the title was necessary.
Between 1923 and 1938 At...
October 16, 2007
A few days ago we remembered Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York and on the Pentagon six years ago. Out of the 19 attackers, 16 were Saudi Arabs, however, in the designation of culprits, Osama bin Laden was singled out and requested from the Taliban government in Afghanistan...
September 07, 2007
Some of my readers have objected that I had mentioned in the previous letter too few of President George W. Bush’s doings and asked me to make a more complete presentation of his legacy. This article will try to remedy that.
The previous article was discussing mostly foreign events. This artic...
August 15, 2007
President Bush has been in the White House since 2001 and has relatively little time left until November 2008. I hear that he is worried about his legacy and would like to do a few more things until 2008 to correct it. I would like to review some of his doings since he was sworn in in 2001.
In ...
August 01, 2007
The Turkish parliamentary elections occurred on July 22, 2007 and the religious Justice and Development Party (A.K.P) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan won it by getting 46.66 % of the vote. Because in 2007 fewer parties remained under the 10 % threshold than in 2002, this time A.K.P will have only 340 seat...
July 14, 2007
On July 22 Turkey is going to have parliamentary elections. This year, the election is very important, because the laicists (secularists) will try to stop the Islamist AK Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to secure its hold on the Turkish state and on life in Turkey. This election will decide what kind...
June 30, 2007
We have the best election system in the world, but we have degenerated it by allowing corporations to support the candidates and hence earn their loyalty. In real democracy, sovereignty must belong to the people. But in the U.S. sovereignty belongs to the corporations. Similarly, we have the best e...
June 23, 2007
Last October, I read Paul A. Hanle’s article in Washington Post titled “Waging War on Evolution”. Of course I completely agreed with Hanle, who said, “If we are to continue to be leaders in the global economy, we must teach science, not religion, in the science classroom”. It is actually much wors...
June 20, 2007
The United States is the wealthiest and most modern country in the world. But, President George W. Bush is changing some of the most basic characteristics of this society and risks to destroy it.
The Europeans fought for 400 years to break the power of the church and to separate church from sta...
June 11, 2007
The success of a country’s foreign policy depends to a great extend upon the thorough knowledge of its people on the history, geography, and culture of foreign countries. The lack of such knowledge usually leads to foreign policy catastrophes.
I made my high school education in Turkey. Duri...
June 11, 2007
Ataturk’s reforms in Turkey (1923 – 1938) created a modern and survivable nation out of the remnants of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Part of these reforms was to eliminate the influence of religion in public life, that is called “laicism”, outlawing the Sharia, and emancipating the women. He told...
May 31, 2007
As I was getting ready to move to the United States in 1953, I visited in Ankara the father of my good friend from high school, Mr. Memduh Shevket Esendal. Of course, he wished me much success in my new job, then said: “I thought you should know how the country you are going to live in is governed...
May 31, 2007
In my previous article I discussed the influence of petroleum corporations on our foreign policy. In order to take the bridles of our political life in our own hand, and stop being led like a docile caw by our nose, we have to go to the bottom of this question: How do the corporations get that power...
May 30, 2007
As I was getting ready to move to the United States in 1953, I visited in Ankara the father of my good friend from high school, Mr. Memduh Shevket Esendal. Of course, he wished me much success in my new job, then said: “I thought you should know how the country you are going to live in is governed...