This episode is the second part of an article - The Triple Faces of Inner Asia, which was written and published in early 2015.“...The export of the Roman order is not free of cost. It must be at the cost of consuming the domestic political resources of the United States. The conditions and procedures for the purchase of the Roman order by the nations will inevitably constitute an important constitutional issue for the future world...Today Moscow during Eid feels more Bagdad than Bagdad itself, or rather, it feels more Istanbul than its precursor Constantinople before its eventual fall to the Ottomans. The Muslims in Russia are different from those in Europe. ”

This episode is the first part of an article - The Triple Faces of Inner Asia (內亞的三重面相), which was written and published in early 2015. "...Pakistan maximally demonstrates the dilemma that Inner Asia presents to the United States. Other than the hatred against India, this country does not have any natural and genuine ties to unite its communities... Afghanistan is another country without natural bonds. Her borders and existence were to meet the needs of being a buffer country between Britain and Russia. They are totally inconsistent with the needs of the local residents to establish a community if they do have such needs..

"...Most of the fund has to be used to feed the troops and there is no cash left to buy oil. Yet Iran has already sent the oil to Kabul. Who is advancing this money? Surely not the US. Iran is extremely short of dollars and it can only be deduced that China has advanced this money to Iran. This is very similar to the practices of Chinese espionage in Ethiopia, Burma, and indeed around the world in the last two years."

“China is an inexperienced neo-imperialist, so almost everywhere it has pursued neo-imperialism, going beyond the US framework and building its own framework, there have been serious political crises. Three typical examples are Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia...But at least in the Obama era, China was only an ancillary among the various players in Afghanistan - a humble wage earner... All these endeavors are without exception economically unprofitable, even loss-making, but they will provide China with a large and solid backstop outside the US system.”

"The Taliban can be converted, integrated, and disbanded while the Islamic State is a lifelong vowed professional revolutionary organization that cannot be disbanded but only annihilated... Judging from IS documents seized by the US, the Islamic State exhibits, contrary to prevailing impressions, striking similarities to the Communist International and the Soviet Union... History shows the Taliban is likely to be a transitory phenomenon that shall gradually be swallowed up by the Islamic State. "

"In order to counter the American-trained security forces, the Taliban also had to break from the beyond tribal traditions by training their own elite soldiers, the so-called Red Unit... The Taliban cannot possibly afford a large troop like this. But every time there is a key battle, against ISIS or the Afghan government forces, or at a critical location like Kunduz to support an important warlord ally, the Red Unit is deployed. This was the state of the Taliban's military in the later stages...Whereas, even after losing territorial control, the Islamic State with tens of thousands of permanent troops, is still much more powerful than the Taliban. As they welcomed Al Qaeda before, the Taliban welcomed the Islamic State coming with money and weapons. But there is no free lunch."

"...In fact, an impoverished Afghanistan governed by tribal alliances formed by warlords would be more stable, thanks to the lack of money. What problems did the unprecedented influx of money bring? It brought with it modernization, a new order, hence a serious threat to the old order and its elite class with vested interests... The Taliban is an organization of students of traditional Islamic schools who cannot afford to attend a western-style school..."

"...In the competition between man and nature, man will always be the loser. Every partial success prepares the ground for a larger collapse in the future. It is, therefore, wiser not to be really able to cope with epidemics or any future challenges, but to know what was still very familiar to the primitive tribesmen and those of the early medieval Christians in the time of the English Civil War and Cromwell: that humans need to be familiar with dealing with death and with risk... "

"...This is a typical human mentality. At first you are afraid to die a miserable death without vaccination. You consider yourself mistreated if you don't get the vaccine, and those who do are privileged. A few decades later, you take it for granted that you're still alive, and that the society and the world as a whole are obliged to keep you alive up to a ripe old age. Then when you realise others don’t suffer from side effects but you do, you start to blame the government, the society and the world for having wronged you..."

“...What is meant by the divine will? The divine will is that the forces that oppose you will eventually work for you. Although FDR and his New Deal allies did not want to make America an empire, although McCarthy and the opponents of the New Deal did not want to make America an empire, and although neither the supporters nor the opponents of the Vietnam War thought of America as an empire, the combined force of their actions pushed America step by step on the path to becoming an empire. When the New Deal pushed America to the left, it brought America one step closer to be an empire; when Cold-War liberalism pushed America to the right, it brought America one step closer to be an empire; when the neoconservatives pushed America even further to the right, it made this America more of an empire than ever before.”

“...At the same time, because of the existence of such institutions, it is hard to avoid becoming an empire because the system itself had its own power...  This institution, which can scare the Communist Party, should probably mirror the Communist Party. It also needs bureaucratic institutions and armies as large as the Communist Party, otherwise, you can’t oppose the latter... For McCarthy, this was very painful because he had a close flesh-and-blood connection with the American community, it was a great pain for him to leave politics. But for Ayn Rand, it did not matter. She was what I call a rootless wanderer from the very beginning. She had no flesh-and-blood relationship with American society. She was an intellectual and relied on selling her theory... ”

"...Such an America could not have played a major role in world history. The key to this significant role lies in two events: the New Deal and the Second World War... If you only treat this phenomenon as a dichotomy of the left and the right,  you haven’t grasped its full depth. The correct understanding is that it is in essence a Roman imperial nature..."

"...The good guys around us are just like those in the movies. Senator McCarthy was then such a Judge Hardy. At the same time, Ayn Rand was a wanderer who first found her way to New York and California, with a little bit of achievement and a little bit of money, started to cultivate her social life... Since Ayn Rand came to California and then moved back to New York, her social circle consisted largely of intellectuals... The way she understood American society was totally different from those of McCarthy who relied on his experience and instinct..."

"... What is civic education? The people are the rulers, and what is the task of the rulers? A ruler is someone who takes risks for the ruled, just as a parent is someone who takes risks for a child... The people of a truly sustainable democracy are accustomed to mortality, war and danger. They are used to learning the necessity of making the right decisions in the midst of all sorts of dangers, at the cost of wrong decisions and bad decisions. They are comfortable with developing the ability to manage risk in themselves as leaders..."

Season 3 Pandemics and Beyond Episode 1 Dense but homogeneous populations"... The spread of infectious diseases requires densely inhabited conditions, which is tantamount to requiring civilization itself. Civilization has the innate concept of a dense population... One byproduct of civilization is that it allows its certain beneficiary groups, such as those that first invented agriculture, to breed in large numbers with relatively homogeneous genotypes, and as a result create a susceptible population in an epidemiological sense..."

Season 2 - Lords and WanderersThe third episode is a part of a casual discussion between William and Zhensi Yuan taken place in 2014. The full script for the discussion (in Traditional Chinese) has been published as a book《文明更迭的源代碼》and is available on Amazon. "A responsible landlord as a chief stakeholder in a community can become a rootless wanderer, just as a peasant can turn into a vagabond..."Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/auntology_pod

Season 2 - Lords and WanderersThe first two episodes are excerpts from an invited talk of YiXi, which was first published on April 12, 2014.  The full video (in Mandarin Chinese) is at https://youtu.be/edB7ly0_KSc ."One thing that has been consistent from the Middle Ages to the present, when comparing the West with China, is that the West has always had much richer organisational resources than China. Chinese society is flattened and scattered, an iteration of countless single cells, and complex structures cannot be created, just as a pagoda cannot be built on top of quicksand. "Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/auntology_pod

Season 2 - Lords and WanderersThe first two episodes are excerpts from an invited talk of YiXi, which was first published on April 12, 2014.  The full video (in Mandarin Chinese) is at https://youtu.be/edB7ly0_KSc ."One thing is different though, the Chinese dream does not really exist. The so-called American Dream is a stable consensus that runs through history and permeates across society, such as individualism, personal striving, a sense of protagonism by ordinary people, that sort of thing. There is no such consensus in China, and the Chinese Dream is merely a cosmetic phrase, used for perfunctory purposes. "Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/auntology_pod

"...In this regard, I suggest that all of you: first, do not believe a word in Chinese history textbooks; second, for the books produced by Chinese scholars, even though we must respect their ability to verify and collect information, you'd better not subscribe to their conclusions, because they are essentially ignorant of ecological fields in the sense of evolutionary ecology..."

“...As a very cunning man with a deep understanding of imperial court politics, under the desperate circumstances of 1972, I believe, Mao had no better choice. China was in the same situation as Assad and Damascus today: the Soviets wanted him to die, the Americans wanted him to die, his own party comrades wanted him to die, and the people had been tormented by you almost to death, so as soon as he breathed his last, his end would be very terrible, and he may even be killed before death...”