Each November, we are reminded of the bravery and dedication of those who have served our country. At Cadence, we thank our Veteran employees for their patriotism by reaffirming our commitment to honoring their sacrifices and recognizing their contributions to our business success. Our diverse and inclusive culture is strengthened by the unique perspective of our Veteran employees, and we are proud to support the Veterans Inclusion Group as a space for community members and their allies to connect. In celebration of Veterans Day, we were excited to catch up with Johnathan Edmonds, Veterans Inclusion Group Lead and Design Engineering Director, for a heartfelt chat on his journey through military service to leadership within Cadence. Throughout the conversation, he shared the importance of creating space for Veterans, the skills they offer, and his aspirations for what the Veterans Inclusion Group will achieve in the years ahead. Oh yeah, and he flies planes, too! Join us as we dive into what makes this holiday special for so many across the nation and how we can respectfully commemorate it together. Johnathan, you’re a retired Air Force Reservist, pilot, and now a Design Engineering Director. Can you tell us about your journey from the military to your current role at Cadence? I started my military and electronics journey in the Navy. I enlisted at 18 and served for six years as an aviation electronics technician. During this time, I was able to learn about and repair electronics on planes. This set me up for success, and when I was honorably discharged, I attended Virginia Tech to study computer engineering. Once I graduated, I continued my career as an engineer, but I still wanted to be a military pilot. From my past experience, I knew the reserves were an option where I could learn to fly and still have a civilian career. Not only was I lucky enough to get selected to go to pilot training, but after I returned from flight school, my luck grew, and I was hired at Cadence. Cadence has supported me throughout my military career, which has been a great benefit, as many companies don’t support reservists. The best thing about serving and being employed at Cadence is how I could blend my skill sets to further the Air Force’s mission and achieve great things in engineering. As the first lead of Cadence’s Veterans Inclusion Group, you played an integral part in growing our culture and building community at the company since launching the group four years ago. What inspired you to take on the role of Inclusion Group Lead? I was inspired by three things: camaraderie, service, and outreach. I wanted to see if we could achieve a similar sense of community through the Veterans Inclusion Group as we had during our service life. I also wanted to see how we could better serve our Veterans here at Cadence. I wanted to explore any benefits that could be expanded, roles that could be developed by Vets, and, lastly, I wanted to serve a broader community. COVID-19 put a damper on some of the community support, but we are getting back on track with Veteran employment programs and volunteer efforts like Carry the Load and Gold Star Families. Why is it important to have this space dedicated to Veteran employees? There are many reasons! Networking, for one, creates a stronger, more unified Cadence culture. Two, Vets face a variety of issues not generally understood by those who have not served, such as PTSD, where to get help for disabilities, how to get an old medical record, etc. As I mentioned, I’m also passionate about connecting Veterans with employment and job opportunities. It is so nice to work for a company that actively recruits Vets. We have our own “language,” if you will, so it’s nice to have a space to talk in the language that we are familiar with. What have been some of your favorite moments leading this group over the past few years? Are there any “wins” that you would like to recognize? We have a lot of wins. Events held during COVID-19 and getting past COVID-19, donating to worthwhile causes, and hosting guest speakers are all fantastic milestones and accomplishments. That said, the biggest win is the hiring of new Veteran employees. Mark Murphy, Corporate VP of Sales Operations, and I have both welcomed Vets to our team during this time, and it is such a joy to watch what someone can do when given the opportunity to succeed in the right environment. As you are set to transition out of the lead role next year, what do you hope to see the Veterans Inclusion Group accomplish next? My hope is that the Veterans Inclusion Group partners with other companies, expanding our reach externally and exploring new opportunities to engage Veterans outside of Cadence. Johnathan (left) speaks on an inclusion group panel, along with David Sallard (center), lead of Cadence's Black Inclusion Group and Sr. Principal Application Engineer; Christina Jamerson (on screen), lead of Cadence's Abilities Inclusion Group and Demand Generation Director; and Dianne Rambke (right), lead of Cadence's Latinx Inclusion Group and Marketing Communications Director. What are the important ways that people can signal inclusion and respectfully honor Veterans at work? What are the most meaningful or impactful actions employees everywhere can take to support Veteran coworkers? I think there is one answer to both questions. I recommend that people engage with their companies’ employee resource groups (ERGs) and have conversations with them. Opening up the lines of communication will lead to new paths in their journeys. What are you looking forward to in 2025, both personally and professionally? In 2025, professionally, I am looking forward to taking mixed-signal systems and verification to another level by including emulation, automatic model generation, and seeing which boundaries we can push in our SerDes and Chiplets products. Personally, I am looking forward to making my SXS street legal so I can drive places without getting a ticket, seeing my children participate in sports, church, and school, and taking my wife on vacation to Europe or somewhere else we can unplug. Learn more about Cadence’s Inclusion Groups, diverse culture, and commitment to belonging.

This is the 18th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

The man who gave us our national anthem, Rabindranath Tagore, once wrote that nationalism was “a great menace.” He went on to say, “It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles.”

Not just India’s, but the world’s: In his book The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945 as Adolf Hitler was defeated, Karl Popper ripped into nationalism, with all its “appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility.”

Nationalism is resurgent today, stomping across the globe hand-in-hand with populism. In India, too, it is tearing us apart. But must nationalism always be a bad thing? A provocative new book by the Israeli thinker Yael Tamir argues otherwise.

In her book Why Nationalism, Tamir makes the following arguments. One, nation-states are here to stay. Two, the state needs the nation to be viable. Three, people need nationalism for the sense of community and belonging it gives them. Four, therefore, we need to build a better nationalism, which brings people together instead of driving them apart.

The first point needs no elaboration. We are a globalised world, but we are also trapped by geography and circumstance. “Only 3.3 percent of the world’s population,” Tamir points out, “lives outside their country of birth.” Nutopia, the borderless state dreamed up by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, is not happening anytime soon.

If the only thing that citizens of a state have in common is geographical circumstance, it is not enough. If the state is a necessary construct, a nation is its necessary justification. “Political institutions crave to form long-term political bonding,” writes Tamir, “and for that matter they must create a community that is neither momentary nor meaningless.” Nationalism, she says, “endows the state with intimate feelings linking the past, the present, and the future.”

More pertinently, Tamir argues, people need nationalism. I am a humanist with a belief in individual rights, but Tamir says that this is not enough. “The term ‘human’ is a far too thin mode of delineation,” she writes. “Individuals need to rely on ‘thick identities’ to make their lives meaningful.” This involves a shared past, a common culture and distinctive values.

Tamir also points out that there is a “strong correlation between social class and political preferences.” The privileged elites can afford to be globalists, but those less well off are inevitably drawn to other narratives that enrich their lives. “Rather than seeing nationalism as the last refuge of the scoundrel,” writes Tamir, “we should start thinking of nationalism as the last hope of the needy.”

Tamir’s book bases its arguments on the West, but the argument holds in India as well. In a country with so much poverty, is it any wonder that nationalism is on the rise? The cosmopolitan, globe-trotting elites don’t have daily realities to escape, but how are those less fortunate to find meaning in their lives?

I have one question, though. Why is our nationalism so exclusionary when our nation is so inclusive?

In the nationalism that our ruling party promotes, there are some communities who belong here, and others who don’t. (And even among those who ‘belong’, they exploit divisions.) In their us-vs-them vision of the world, some religions are foreign, some values are foreign, even some culinary traditions are foreign – and therefore frowned upon. But the India I know and love is just the opposite of that.

We embrace influences from all over. Our language, our food, our clothes, our music, our cinema have absorbed so many diverse influences that to pretend they come from a single legit source is absurd. (Even the elegant churidar-kurtas our prime minister wears have an Islamic origin.) As an example, take the recent film Gully Boy: its style of music, the clothes its protagonists wear, even the attitudes in the film would have seemed alien to us a few decades ago. And yet, could there be a truer portrait of young India?

This inclusiveness, this joyous khichdi that we are, is what makes our nation a model for the rest of the world. No nation embraces all other nations as ours does. My India celebrates differences, and I do as well. I wear my kurta with jeans, I listen to ghazals, I eat dhansak and kababs, and I dream in the Indian language called English. This is my nationalism.

Those who try to divide us, therefore, are the true anti-nationals. We must reclaim nationalism from them.

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
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From historically underperforming when compared with its peers, the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate is now attracting major investment projects on the back of its auto and electrification expertise.

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Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

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All over the world, women have been clamouring for gender equality, development and peace in the interest of all humanity. The calls reached a crescendo with the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BDPfA) put in place in September 1995 under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). The Beijing Declaration was particularly targeted at ensuring that the voice of women everywhere was heard, while recognising the diversity of women, their roles and the circumstances inhibiting women’s interests. The BDPfA also aimed at ensuring the full implementation of the human rights of women and the girl child as an inalienable, […]

Our Lord said, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, pick up his cross and follow Me.” The church of Jesus Christ, of course, is

Our Lord said, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, pick up his cross and follow Me.” The church of Jesus Christ, of course, is

The U.S. Senate's Democratic majority began a crusade on Tuesday to confirm as many new federal judges nominated by President Joe Biden as possible to avoid leaving vacancies that Republican Donald Trump could fill after taking office on Jan. 20. With Republicans set to take control of the chamber on Jan. 3, the Senate on Tuesday held a confirmation vote on one of Biden's judicial nominees - former prosecutor April Perry - for the first time since Trump won the Nov. 5 presidential election. The Senate voted 51-44 in favor of her becoming a U.S. district court judge in Illinois. All told, Biden has announced another 30 judicial nominees who are awaiting Senate confirmation votes. Sixteen have already have been reviewed by the Senate Judiciary Committee and are awaiting a final confirmation vote by the full Senate. Another 14 nominees are awaiting committee review. The U.S. Constitution assigns to the Senate the power to confirm a president's nominees for life-tenured seats on the federal judiciary. "We are going to get as many done as we can," Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. Trump made 234 judicial appointments during his first four years in office, the second most of any president in a single term, and succeeded in moving the judiciary rightward - including building a 6-3 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court with three appointees. Biden has appointed a host of liberal judges. Since the beginning of his presidency in 2021, the Senate has confirmed 214 Biden judicial nominees, including liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. About two-thirds were women, and the same share were racial minorities. Senate Democrats are under pressure to swiftly confirm the remaining nominees, along with any new picks Biden may name in the waning weeks of his presidency. How many nominees Senate Democrats will be able to confirm remains to be seen. Trump in a social media post on Sunday called on the Senate to halt approving Biden's nominees, saying, "Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges." Billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk on Tuesday wrote on social media that "activist" judicial nominees are "bad for the country." Mike Davis, a Trump ally at the conservative judicial advocacy group Article III Project, in another post urged Senate Republicans to vote down all judicial appointments until January. "The American people voted for monumental change," Davis wrote on social media last week. "Grind the Senate to a halt." Current Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's office declined comment. McConnell has consistently opposed Biden's nominees and, as majority leader, was instrumental in getting Trump's previous nominees confirmed. Trump's judicial appointees have been involved in major decisions welcomed by conservatives including Supreme Court rulings rolling back abortion rights, widening gun rights, rejecting race-conscious collegiate admissions and limiting the power of federal regulatory agencies. Judicial nominees require a simple majority for confirmation. Democrats currently hold a slim 51-49 majority, meaning that they can ill afford any defections or absences if Republicans show up in force to oppose Biden's nominees during the chamber's post-election "lame duck" session. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has said he would not vote for any nominee who does not garner at least one Republican vote. Must-pass legislation like a spending bill to avert a government shutdown also may consume precious time during the session. 'Every possible nominee' Biden's allies have said a concerted push to confirm his remaining nominees would allow him to build on his legacy of helping to diversify a federal bench long dominated by white men. He is not done nominating judges. On Friday, Biden announced his first post-election nominee, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who after unsuccessfully running in the 2021 Democratic primary to be Manhattan district attorney was picked for a job as a federal district judge in New York. A spokesperson for Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat and chair of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that he "aims to confirm every possible nominee before the end of this Congress." White House spokesperson Andrew Bates on Monday noted that during Trump's first term, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed 18 judges after Biden had won the 2020 election but before he took office. Pending nominees include five to the influential federal appeals courts. Republicans said before the election that they had the votes to block two of them: Adeel Mangi, who would become the first Muslim federal appellate judge, and North Carolina Solicitor General Ryan Park, who unsuccessfully defended the race-conscious admissions policies before the Supreme Court. There are several others nominated to serve as trial court judges like Perry, a former prosecutor now working at Chicago-headquartered GE HealthCare who would join the bench in Illinois. Biden nominated her to a judgeship in April after her prior nomination to become Chicago's top federal prosecutor was blocked by Republican Senator JD Vance. Vance began placing a hold on Biden's nominees to the U.S. Justice Department in 2023 after Special Counsel Jack Smith secured the first of two federal indictments against Trump, who subsequently picked the senator as his vice presidential running mate.