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The Exemplary Destruction: What Jimmy Lai's Conviction Reveals About Beijing's Control of Hong Kong's Business Elite

The Exemplary Destruction: What Jimmy Lai's Conviction Reveals About Beijing's Control of Hong Kong's Business Elite

Jimmy Lai's life sentence is not punishment but potlatch—the ritual destruction of the most valuable to demonstrate absolute sovereignty. For Hong Kong's surviving tycoons, the message is unmistakable: everything they possess exists at Beijing's pleasure.

The Cartography of Nowhere

The Cartography of Nowhere

The Great Repatriation

The Great Repatriation

The Confessional Booth Has a Backdoor

The Confessional Booth Has a Backdoor

European health ministries have traded data sovereignty for operational capacity, signing contracts with intelligence-linked analytics firms that GDPR cannot constrain. The legal architecture was designed for a threat that no longer exists.

The Invisible Colleague: Second-Order Consequences of AI Agents in the Workforce

The Invisible Colleague: Second-Order Consequences of AI Agents in the Workforce

As AI agents move from augmenting human work to replacing it, the visible efficiency gains obscure deeper structural shifts: fractured career pipelines, gamified hiring systems, new forms of political dependency, and the quiet collapse of institutional knowledge transfer.

The Fence That Feeds the Fire

The Fence That Feeds the Fire

Donald Trump has inherited the most ambitious technology containment regime since the Cold War and vowed to make it stronger. The controls are working—just not in the ways Washington intended. As export restrictions multiply, they are reshaping the US-China competition in ways that may...

The Geography of Fear

The Geography of Fear

America's military infrastructure is migrating eastward and fragmenting as it goes. The redistribution of bases and decentralization of command reveal what doctrine papers obscure: the United States has accepted that its dominance can no longer be assumed, only contested.

The Arsenal Paradox

The Arsenal Paradox

The next global conflict will be decided not by battlefield technology but by industrial architecture—the ability to produce weapons at scale while economies continue functioning. The United States is losing this race before the shooting starts.

The Temple and the Trap

The Temple and the Trap

A leaked phone call, a disputed cliff-top temple, and two nations' domestic politics collided in 2025 to produce Southeast Asia's bloodiest conflict in decades. The Thailand-Cambodia crisis reveals how ancient grievances become modern catastrophes—and why neither side can afford to stop fighting.

The Lights in the Sky Are Not What You Think

The Lights in the Sky Are Not What You Think

For seventy-seven years, governments have investigated unidentified aerial phenomena with billions of dollars and thousands of personnel. The findings point not toward alien visitors but toward something more unsettling: the systematic limits of human perception, institutional knowledge, and our...

The Pipeline and the Sword

The Pipeline and the Sword

Russia's weaponisation of energy exports has transformed NATO's strategic calculus more profoundly than any military build-up since 1991. The alliance now faces a contest where molecules matter as much as missiles—and where Europe's thirty-year bet on interdependence has become its most...

The Glacier's Verdict

The Glacier's Verdict

At 4,500 metres in the Depsang Plains, sovereignty dissolves with the permafrost. Chinese and Indian soldiers patrol terrain that is literally disappearing beneath their boots—glaciers retreating, watersheds shifting, the physical geography that once defined borders melting into cartographic...