Thai Rak Thai’s Victory

 

It was removed by a military coup, dissolved by court order some years ago, its successor also dissolved by court order and a subsequent leader banned from politics because he hosted a cookery show on TV, a new category of law was introduced as a pretext for another court to seize the assets of its leader who himself was convicted of a crime in a case in which, according at least to some authorities, no law was broken and no complaint ever received — yet Thai Rak Thai has claimed another victory in Thai politics.

Read the full article here.

Poetry of Blake: A Warsong to Englishmen

English history is marked by the numbers of times that groups of men have been called together to fight, most commonly overseas with a view to conquest but within the country as well. English troops dominated Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as well as France and other parts of Europe and, in combination with imperial troops, allies and mercenaries, across the Americas, India and east Asia, Africa and Australasia.

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Review of Anderson’s The Rebel Den of Nung Tri Cao

Author James Anderson, a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, introduces his topic suggesting that one of most important issues in the contemporary political economy, the impact of the rise of China, may have some light shed upon it by the study of an eleventh century Vietnamese rebel and his subsequent reception on both sides of the mountainous Sino-Vietnamese border. After all, the rebel, Nung Tri Cao (whose name should have a couple of accents it is not possible for me to recreate in html) existed in the conceptual and geographical space between two significant powers – the Chinese and Dai Viet thrones – and sought not just to create a state of his own but to legitimize himself and his efforts with respect to recognition from the Chinese emperor.

Read the full review here.

Evil Dragons Now Available at Amazon

Evil Dragons is now available at Amazon. My story in this anthology, edited by Chris Bartholomew, is called ‘The Yellow Dragon.’

I would like to write more fiction but at the moment I’m a bit busy with other kinds of work at the moment.

 

Thinking and Non-Thinking in Thailand

On a recent trip to Hua Hin, a couple of hours south of Bangkok via the expressway, I was reminded yet again of how the road using skills are of so many people. Car, bus and pickup drivers, as well as motor cyclists and pedestrians, routinely ignore what appears to be rudimentary common sense in driving the wrong way down the road, reversing on to the highway without so much as checking the mirrors and generally acting as if no one could possibly affect them or be affected by their actions.

Read the full article here.

Poetry of Blake: Cradle Song

Blake’s poem Cradle Song rests upon a contradiction, a contradiction that provides a rather unsettling sentiment that will be familiar to most if not all parents. How many times has it been said of a baby sleeping or wriggling in a cradle that he or she is thinking some secret thing, that the child is really rather intelligent and that she or he knows what we are saying. The contradiction here, therefore, is that the seed of knowledge is within the child already and that, far from seeing something fanciful or sentimental, we are merely seeing what will inevitably arise whether we want it to be the case or not.

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Yingluck’s Challenge

Campaigning is now in full swing for the next Thai general election, which is due to be held on July 3rd. Most attention is focusing on the role of Ms Yingluck Shinawatra, newly appointed leader of the Pheu Thai party and likely to be the country’s first female Prime Minister.

Read the full article here.

Perspectives on Investment in Myanmar’s Infrastructure: Viewpoints of Foreign Investors

Announcing:

Ampornstira, Fuangfa and John Walsh, “Perspectives on Investment in Myanmar’s Infrastructure: Viewpoints of Foreign Investors,” GITAM Journal of Management, VOl.9, No.2 (April-June, 2011), pp.1-10.

Abstract:

Infrastructure, broadly defined to include a wide range of facilities from road and rail to telecommunications and internet connectivity, can play important roles in economic development, improving the efficiency of governance and social cohesion. InMyanmar, the level of infrastructural development has until recent years been very poor and has constrained economic and social development. However, oil revenues have enabled both a significant increase in expenditure on infrastructure and the reason for it. Since infrastructure concessions require technical capacity and financial and managerial resources, it is certain that foreign private sector partners will be involved in jointly developing projects. To date, little has been discovered of the views of the representatives of such foreign partners concerning the issues and difficulties involved in doing business in Myanmar and how, if at all, they are able to overcome these .Using the results of a program of qualitative research, this paper seeks to provide some baseline information on these perspectives and concludes that the military government is involved in opening the country to a very limited form of capitalist development, with pre-capitalist modes of contracting and restriction of infrastructure development to those areas which it believes it can continue to control.

Strategic Management: The Zero-Sum Game

The zero-sum game is a concept that derives from the study of game theory. It relates to the idea that an interaction between two parties (in the sphere of business, in this case) results in one side winning and the other side losing by exactly the same amount. If I sell you something is worthless and you give me one dollar, then you have lost one dollar and I have won one dollar – overall, then, this would be a zero-sum game.

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Strategic Management: What Is Strategy?

 

Strategy comes from the Greek word ‘strategos’ which is a term for a high-ranking military official or general. The concept of strategy derives, therefore, from the context of military thought and that explains why so much of management thought and literature is written the way it is.

Read the full article here.