Latest Posts
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Mao is Dead – Again
Education officials in Shanghai are downgrading the Mao myth in the high school curriculum: When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history… Continue reading
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Mencius Responds to Bush and Rumsfeld
President Bush is intensifying his rhetoric on the Iraq war. So is Rumsfeld. Mencius replies: Talk is easy when you don’t have to get the job done. (136). They are not trying to "get the job… Continue reading
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Ernest Gellner and Chuang Tzu
Just back from a two-day jaunt to New York City. We saw a Yankee game, a win for Wang Chien-ming! But more on that later. On the train I was re-reading a book I have assigned… Continue reading
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Tu Fu and Aidan
I’m out of town today, down in the big city. Here’s a poem I found by Tu Fu that touched my heart: Thinking of my Little Boy Apart still, and already the oriole songsFill warm spring days. Changing… Continue reading
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Advice to A-Rod: Give up the Analysis
For those of you who, like me, are Yankee fans, the tribulations of Alex Rodriguez are well known. Here is a description from today’s NYT: This season, he is batting .279 with 26 homers and 93 runs batted… Continue reading
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Mencian Biology
Richard Rorty reviews Marc D. Hauser’s new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, in yesterday’s NYT Book Review. Rorty describes the book’s project thusly: Nazi parents found it easy to turn… Continue reading
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Singaporean Legalism
A fairly new blog, A Serial Number on my Vote, has a nice post and some good comments that detail the parallels between PAP leadership in Singapore and classical Legalism (hat tip: Singabloodypore). This adds more specifics to… Continue reading
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Beijing Weekend – Not this weekend!
I heard from my editor last week and he told me that they will not be running my column every week. Seems that they have a number of other contributors and they want to run a wider variety… Continue reading
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Hurricane Katrina: Bush Lost the Mandate of Heaven
Last year when Hurricane Katrina struck, I asked the I Ching if this meant Bush might lose the Mandate of Heaven. The answer I received then centered on the actions that Bush might undertake. Here’s the key graph:… Continue reading
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Edmund Burke channels Confucius
I am reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism. It raises many good questions, though I am not sure it provides as clear a set of answers as I had hoped. In any event, I just came across this… Continue reading
The Useless Tree 