Inside the Asylum

Chinese people will never forget old friends. Liang Guanglie, state councilor and China's Defense Minister stressed, "The Chinese people thank the old friend Gen. Joseph Warren Stilwell forever, who had made positive contributions to China's anti-fascist war." ... In 2003, the former residence of Gen. Stilwell in Chongqing was rebuilt into the "Stilwell Museum"... Likewise, the Chinese people will never forget the U.S. "Flying Tigers" which had fought side by side with the Chinese troops... The "Flying Tigers" Museum was opened to public officially in Zhijiang, China's Hunan Province in 2006 and the "Flying Tigers Research Society" was formed in Yunnan Province in 2007. And the work of searching the remains of the "Flying Tigers" members and the aircraft debris is still under way.

BRITAIN under Gordon Brown's Labour Government is a more unequal country than it was under Margaret Thatcher or at any time since modern records began in the early 1960s, after the incomes of the poor fell and those of the rich rose in the three years after the 2005 election.

Since this is out of the Guardian Newspaper, it's clearly a call for even more socialism in Britain, but it has unintentionally pointed out something that really deserves to be highlighted. It's not hard to find accusations that Thatcher was "uncaring and heartless" or even "an evil, twisted woman" but her conservative policies were actually better for the common people than are those of the Labour Party. US voters would do well to pay attention: the party that says it is for people and not for those nasty capitalists, and which may even pursue policies that they genuinely believe are for the benefit of the people, may not actually benefit the people.

Alas, in the words of the Iron Lady herself,

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

Yu Dan, is a megastar. Most in the west have never heard her, but she's sold over 10 million books in China (and half of those were even legal versions!) She's riding the new wave of enthusiasm for all things old that is currently sweeping China. They've been revising ancient sacrificial ceremonies and building new cultural edifices faster than I can keep up with. Communism is dead and buried in China. So what made Yu Dan so famous? Basically she likes to talk about the ideas she gets from reading Confucius' Analects, and then she tries to apply it to modern life. That's it. Now her book Confucius from the Heart has been released in an English language version.
One last comment: Confucianism is a very nice political philosophy. I mean really nice. It's an entirely positive development that China is moving away from communist ideology just as fast as she can, straight back into the arms of her much-missed traditional culture. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is purely some government inspired program. From what I can tell, it's more that the government has let it be known that it doesn't mind, and the people themselves have launched this Old Culture Movement.

Obama's enemy the Irish appear to be no great threat.

The head of the Irish UN battalion in Chad has banned troops from playing football [soccer], saying the arid country's hard ground is a health risk... Irish ground, he pointed out, was "not nearly as hard... Some of the sports are played out on open ground and when people fall, it tends to have a much greater impact on their bodies than falling in a field in Ireland."