Image source ខ្មាសល្ងងទើបចេះ ខ្មាសក្រទើបមាន Shame of ignorance leads to knowledge; shame of poverty leads to wealth. —Khmer Proverb Earlier this week I was grousing on twitter about books like Ursuala Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, or Ian Banks Culture series. The obvious connection between all […]
Image source. François Bougon’s book, Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping is excellent. It is accessible to those who have but a cursory interest in China, yet does a better job of describing the actual motives and ideology of Xi Jinping than the vast majority of writing about the man in more wonkish publications. It […]
Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is gargantuan. Really. This intellectual history clocks in at over 760 pages. It narrates various theorists’ attempts to discover and describe the principles of strategy over the last few centuries of Western thought. Freedman covers many definitions of the word ‘strategy’ but never settles on any one of them: the […]
Image source “Closed politics cannot be a permanent feature of Chinese society…. We can cooperate with the emerging China of today, even as we work for the democratic China of tomorrow.” —Robert Zoellick,Deputy Secretary of State [2005]. “Since the Vietnam war, the U.S. has more often chosen the strategy of ‘winning without a war.’ This […]
