Napatra
November 2012
1 post
September 2012
1 post
“His desire to hear out junior people is a warm personality trait as much as a cool tactic, of a piece with his desire to play golf with White House cooks rather than with C.E.O.’s and basketball with people who treat him as just another player on the court; to stay home and read a book rather than go to a Washington cocktail party; and to seek out, in any crowd, not the beautiful people but the old people. The man has his status needs, but they are unusual. And he has a tendency, an unthinking first step, to subvert established status structures. After all, he became president.”
—Obama’s Way by Michael Lewis
March 2012
1 post
“The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences.”
—Michael Lewis, California and Bust
November 2011
3 posts
“Well, you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God… . There’d be no power in the world that could even—I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system … and they will be the leaders of the world.”
—Richard Nixon on China (1971)
“How China was prepared to stand alone, even in the face of a nuclear threat, and fight a protracted guerrilla war on its own against a coalition of all major powers became a standard Chinese narrative over the next decade. Its underlying purpose was to turn self-reliance into a weapon and into a method of mutual assistance based on parallel perceptions.”
—Henry Kissinger, On China (Post Cold War)
“All told there are more than four hundred different types of Chinese cigarettes, each with a distinct identity and meaning. Around Beijing, peasants smoke Red Plum Blossom whites. Red Pagoda Mountain can be found in the pockets of average city folk. Middle-class entrepreneurs like Zhongnanhai Lights. Businessmen with a flair for foreign sport State Express 555. A nouveau riche tosses out Chunghwa like it’s rice. Pandas are the rarest best of all. That was Deng Xiaoping’s favorite brand, and government quotas make them hard to find; a single pack costs more than twelve dollars. If you carry Panda, you’re probably just being pretentious.”
—Peter Hessler, Country Driving
September 2011
3 posts
“诡道也。故能而示之不能，用而示之不用，近而示之远，远而示之近。利而诱之，乱而取之，实而备之，强而避之，怒而挠之，卑而骄之，佚而劳之，亲而离之。攻其无备，出其不意，此兵家之胜，不可先传也。”
—孙子兵法
“Much of the old town was pulled down; what replaced it was being levelled at the time of writing to restore what was there before. Illogical for sure, but this is China.”
—LonelyPlanet China
“You guys need to get a handle on the numbers. The real numbers. You need to sit down with those numbers and figure out the size of the real hole, not the made-up hole. How big is the securities lending? You have to go contract by contract, like bottoms-up, real work. Then you need to make a list of who can help you fill it. This isn’t like, you know, you’re going to be late on your credit card bill.”
—Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase Chairman & CEO to AIG team during the heat of the 2008 financial crisis
August 2011
1 post
“It is for us to decide what we are going to do; whether to swim upriver to make friends with the crocodile or to swim out to sea and hang on to the whale. … Being surrounded on two or three sides by powerful nations, as we are now, what can a small nation like us do? … The only weapons that will be of real use to us will be our mouths and hearts, constituted so as to be full of sense and wisdom for the better protection of ourselves.”
—King Rama IV to his ambassador in Paris
July 2011
3 posts
Play
“Motorcycle taxis are in the cracks of many things. This being in the cracks is both physical and metaphorical. Look at their movements inside traffic: they make space where there is no space. They move in the cracks both within traffic and within society. They move in between classes, in between buildings, in between cars. These are people who are incredibly central to the city, yet incredibly marginal.”
—The Politics of Motorcycle Taxis, Claudio Sopranzetti
Stuck behind China's Great Firewall
This marks the fifth day that I am stuck behind China’s Great Firewall. It feels like I’m at a social media rehab. You know what China doesn’t care to block? MySpace.
June 2011
5 posts
“Why should a financial engineer be paid four times to one hundred times more than a real engineer? A real engineer builds bridges. A financial engineer builds dreams and when those dreams turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.”
—
Andrew Sheng
Chief Advisor, China Banking Regulatory Commission via Inside Job (2010)
On the Booming Global Population
The 24-fold increase in global GDP over the course of the last century isn’t driven by population growth. It is growing consumption per person that is the problem. And that, of course, is not the fault of Africans.
Crazy fact:
The poorest 650 million people on the planet live on about 1% of the income of the richest 650 million. Each year, we add 1% or more to the incomes of those richest people - GDP per capita growth rates in wealthy countries are at least that high. And that 1% growth has the same impact on global consumption as would doubling the number of people living on the income of that bottom 650 million of the world’s population.
From More People, Please by Charles Kenny
“คำว่าพระบารมีผมว่าเป็นสิ่งซึ่งวัฒนธรรมตะวันตกหรือสื่อตะวันตกไม่มีทางเข้าใจได้ เพราะเขามองไปในแง่ที่ว่าพระเจ้าอยู่หัวทรงมีพระราชอำนาจภายใต้รัฐธรรมนูญอย่างไร แต่เขาหยั่งไม่ถึงว่า ในสังคมไทยในวัฒนธรรมไทยตามประวัติศาสตร์ไทย บารมีของแต่ละบุคคลหรือพระบารมีของพระเจ้าอยู่หัวสะสมมาตั้งแต่เริ่มต้นดำรงตำแหน่งนั้นๆ”
—อานันท์ ปันยารชุน: การปฏิรูปประเทศ สถาบันพระมหากษัตริย์ และหนทางของประชาธิปไตยไทย
“If you want to serve the age, betray it.”
—Brendan Kennelly, the Book of Judas
“I studied rock and roll and I grew up in Dublin in the ’70s, music was an alarm bell for me, it woke me up to the world. I was 17 when I first saw The Clash, and it just sounded like revolution. The Clash were like, “This is a public service announcement - with guitars.”
—Bono
