zenpundit.com

ANALOGY FOR SHAPING THE BATTLESPACE

Consider that you intend to play a game of chess with another person and you intend to win. Then, in addition to being able to move the pieces, you can change the shape of the board itself before you even sit down to play. And perhaps the other person has never played a game of chess before, so you rewrite some of the rules of the game. Then you play a game.

That’s shaping the battlespace.

“THAT’S THE CHICAGO WAY”

A couple of noteworthy posts from blogfriend Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz :

“Old, Old News“

“Having mediocre politicians is a consequence of our having a superb private economy. We are, actually, fortunate that we have some relatively competent and public-spirited people in public life at all.

We do not rely for the success of our public institutions that they be staffed by geniuses or the shining lights of the age. To the contrary, as Walter Bagehot noted, we rely on our legislatures to act in the aggregate, to be wiser and abler collectively, or at least able to discern and respond to the public mood and public interest, than the mere sum of its parts, to capture the “wisdom of crowds”. The process seems to work. Despite all its defects, our Congress, in much this form, has legislated for the country throughout its rise from a strip along the Eastern Seaboard to global power. The system works despite the apparent, even manifest, deficiencies of its components, as it it was designed to do.”

While I agree, I will take time to note that we seem to have a surfeit of deficient components these days, on both sides of the aisle. No Daniel Webster serves in Congress today, much less an American Pericles. H.L. Mencken would have had a field day with the 2006 election.

“DC Trip — Claudio Veliz Lecture, Anglosphere Institute Launch“

“This led to his conclusion, which he left as an open question. Will the English speaking world die out? What could cause it to fade away as the prior culture-forming civilization of Greece died out, giving rise to a Hellenistic successor civilization? He seemed to believe that there is nothing in the world that is a mortal threat from outside the Anglosphere (a word he did not use). Rather, the danger is from a lack of understanding and a lack of cultural confidence within the Anglophone world. In other words, the danger is not conquest from without but suicide from within.”

Read the whole thing here. Victor Davis Hanson had some interesting commentary on Alexander and Hellenism in Carnage and Culture while Rene Grousset shed some light on the most exotic outposts of the Hellenistic world, the Greco-Buddhist syncretic kingdoms north of the Syr Darya and west of Tibet in his classic, Empire of the Steppes.

THE COMING OF THE AMERASIAN GLOBAL BOOM

A very interesting article in The New York Times, “The Emperor of Math” about star mathematician Dr. Shing-Tung Yau who teaches and researches at Harvard even as he attempts to cultivate future generations of Chinese mathematicians:

“For nine months of the year, Dr. Yau is a Harvard math professor, best known for inventing the mathematical structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces that underlie string theory, the supposed “theory of everything.” In 1982 he won a Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Dr. Yau can be found holding court in the Yenching restaurant in Harvard Square or off the math library in his cramped office, where the blackboard is covered with equations and sketches of artfully chopped-up doughnuts.

But the other three months he is what his friend Andrew Strominger, a Harvard physicist, called “the emperor ascendant of Chinese science,” one of the most prominent of the “overseas Chinese” who return home every summer to work, teach, lobby, inspire and feud like warlords in an effort to advance world-class science in China. “

Yau is the harbinger of things to come – a growing generation of Chinese and Indian immigrants and their descendants who use their world class Ameican university educations to become the catalysts of human capital ” back home”, that never quite becomes ” home” again. They will be joined in the next two decades by increasing numbers of Koreans, Malays, Thais and Vietnamese who will become a cycle of intellect linking East and West, enriching the world with ideas and enterprises.