The Useless Tree

Politics

  • Judge Mukasey: Tool for Torture

        The nominee for Attorney General of the United States, Judge Michael B. Mukasey, is unable to speak the name of torture: But Mr. Mukasey told Senate Democrats he could not say whether waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was illegal… Continue reading

  • Names and Realities

         The big Chinese Communist Party Congress, the Seventeenth since its inception, has just come to an end in Beijing.  Good times!  A new Central Committee has been "elected" (apparently there were only about 8% more candidates than seats… Continue reading

  • Ancient Thinkers at the Party Congress

         The Chinese Communist Party is holding its 17th Party Congress, a grand affair that happens every five years or so and produces a new line-up of top Party leaders and establishes a new Party line.  It’s a grand… Continue reading

  • How John McCain is Not Confucian

         Over at his wonderfully named ("A Ku Indeed!" – which refers to a great and cryptic passage in the Analects: "a ku [sacred ritual vessel], not a ku, a ku indeed, a ku indeed," 6.25), Chris Panza (a… Continue reading

  • Not A Mencius Among Them

        We are in the run-up to the big Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.  This will be the 17th Party Congress (not to be confused with the People’s Congresses, which are meetings of the legislative branch).  These meetings… Continue reading

  • No Justice

         The failed president, Bush, commuted the jail sentence of his lying underling, "Scooter" Libby.  For his obstruction of justice, then, an obstruction that shielded the constitutionally-challenged Dick Cheney from legal scrutiny, Libby avoids the greatest humiliation, though he… Continue reading

  • Way is Vast

         In one of Robert Henricks’ translation of the Tao Te Ching, which he titles the Te Tao Ching (because the text he works from was found with what is usually known to be the second half of the… Continue reading

  • Confucian Apparatchiks

         China Law Blog picks up a post from a new blog, The Pacific Narrows, which raises political questions about the recent revelations of slave labor in the PRC.  The issue is the use of remonstrance – appealing to… Continue reading

  • Eighteen Years

        This is the day we remember the horrible killings that happened in Beijing in 1989.  While it is true that the greatest number of the killings happened on the night of June 3 in the neighborhoods and intersections… Continue reading

  • Dick Cheney, Please Read Mencius

         The Vice President cannot seem to accept reality; he is impervious to facts. He says, on a right-wing radio show, that al-Qaeda really did have a close, working relationship with Saddam Hussein, a charge that is rebutted fairly… Continue reading