Latest Posts
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Arendt and Confucius
This review in the New Yorker of some books on Hannah Arendt and this post by Peony on Arendt got me to thinking (and that can be dangerous at times). And that thinking involved Confucius, since I noticed an idea… Continue reading
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Mencius and Sun Tzu on Gaza
It is apparent that the Israeli attack on Gaza fails on both moral and strategic grounds. The wide-scale killing of innocents and disproportionality of the Israeli violence make it an unjust war. And, even though he did not argue in… Continue reading
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John Travolta’s Agony: Taoist and Confucian Views
John Travolta's son died. Apparently he had a seizure disorder and was killed by a seizure – that is what the death certificate says, at least. The parents must be devastated. My heart goes out to them. It seems that… Continue reading
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The Real and the Fake
China is famous for the knock-off product, the locally made copy of a famous, often international, brand commodity. There is even a neologism, shanzhai, that is used to denote fake products. But now, it seems, fakery is expanding culturally beyond… Continue reading
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Happy New Year: Why I Write
My mother used to say that you should do on New Year's Day those things you want to do for the whole year. I did some of them today. I walked the dogs with my wife. I cooked (did an… Continue reading
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My Youthful Encounter with Andre Gunder Frank
Peony, from Tang Dynasty Times, asked me to recount an exchange I had, years ago, with eminent economic historian Andre Gunder Frank. There's no ancient Chinese philosophy in this, just a rather amusing personal story. It's a bit long, so… Continue reading
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The Tao of Benjamin Button
A couple of days ago we went to see the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Its premise is, at once, unusual yet obvious: it traces the life of a man born old and who, as he ages, gets… Continue reading
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The Particular and the Universal in Human Rights
Over at A Ku Indeed, Chris and Peony and some others are discussing Daniel Bell's book, East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia. I'm a bit late to the conversation (the end of semester and beginning of… Continue reading
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Samuel Huntington and the Politics of “Civilizations”
Samuel Huntington died on Christmas Eve. He was a fairly famous academic, best known, in the past decade or so, for his "clash of civilizations" idea. For someone of my age, however, there were other, perhaps more important books. His,… Continue reading
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A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Wow. I think I just found a way to stream Dylan Thomas's, "A Child's Christmas in Wales," onto the blog. When you click the links below, a recording of the author reading the piece should download directly to your machine,… Continue reading
The Useless Tree 