Inside the Asylum

Question put to Confucius: "If the ruler of Wei asked you to administer the government, what would you do first?"
Confucius replied, “What is necessary is to rectify names."
"Huh? What do you mean by that?"
The Master replied, “How uncultivated you are! A superior man keeps his mouth shut when he doesn't understand. If names are not correct, then language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly inflicted. When punishments are not properly inflicted, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses must be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks must be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”Analects XIII.3

This Confucius series will probably require more interpretation than my Heinlein one. What is this little conversation all about? "Rectification of Names" is fundamental to Confucianism, and it may best be summed up in the English saying, "to call a spade a spade." Why would rectification of names fix a state? Let's take an example: if you have a tax cheat and you call him Secretary of the Treasury then you are violating a fundamental rule of Confucianism, because his true name is "tax cheat". You must always call someone what he is in reality, not what you would like him to be. Once you have correctly named someone, then you may apply the correct behavior towards that person (disgrace, fines, prison, etc). When tax cheats are not called tax cheats, then disorder is an inevitable result.

Let's consider another important aspect of the Rectification of Names. It is essentially an ancient doctrine of freedom of speech. If a ruler is acting badly, then you must be allowed to accurately describe his behavior. The only basis upon which it should not be permitted is where the accusation is untrue. Show me a doctrine of freedom of speech from the ancient west.

A previous thread (and a comment insulting my praise for Confucianism) got me thinking that I should start a new "Wisdom of ..." series to go alongside from "Wisdom of Heinlein". Stay tuned for more on that. In the meantime, let's start off with a song I first discovered when I was living in the east, and which I used to hum to keep myself sane while riding on crowded public transport. Thanks Monty Python!

The world today seems absolutely crackers,
With nuclear bombs to blow us all sky high.
There's fools and idiots sitting on the trigger.
It's depressing and it's senseless, and that's why...
I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
There's nine hundred million of them in the world today.
You'd better learn to like them; that's what I say.

I like Chinese thought,
The wisdom that Confucius taught.
If Darwin is anything to shout about,
The Chinese will survive us all without any doubt.

A couple of months ago I began my "Wisdom of Heinlein" series, and my first one was this:

“Most liberals believe that water runs downhill, but, praise God, it’ll never reach the bottom.”

From a very early Heinlein short story Solution Unsatisfactory.

Professor Bainbridge writes today about an Obama apparatchik who apparently believes, "You don't need banks and bondholders to make cars."
Bainbridge comments:

that official -- who's probably never run any business more complicated than a lemonade stand -- will soon discover just how wrong s/he was. It's called CAPITALism for a reason, after all... Like most bullies, the Obamabots seem unable to realize that their conduct may have long-term consequences.

What will they do when the water reaches the bottom?
(Via Instapundit)

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Obama's health breakthrough is a $2 trillion saving. In his first big coup as the "consensus president", the major lobby groups voluntarily agreed to trim the growth in health-care costs by 1.5 percentage points a year for the next 10 years... The saving for a family, five years into the pledge, would equate to $US2500 ($3265), White House officials said. They billed the agreement as "a game changer" because it would add new momentum to the push for health-care reform in Congress... America spends 15 per cent of its gross domestic product on health-care costs making it the most expensive system in the world. Its health outcomes are no better than those in many other OECD countries... Exactly what the groups have signed up for is still under wraps.

So "major lobby groups" have agreed to decrease their future increases in health care costs... and this represents $2 trillion dollars of savings? Who knew it was so easy to save money? Maybe the Obama regime can help me save a thousand dollars on my next car by getting GM (Government Motors) to reduce their future price increases by that much. Think of all the possibilities!

Additionally, the claims about US GDP spending and comparisons to the OECD are bogus. Even the BBC only puts US spending at 13%, not all that much more than other western countries, and in return for it, Americans get much better medical results, such as recent comparisons showing that you have a lot better chance of surviving cancer in USA than you do in England. When I think about nightmare scenarios involving a serious illness in myself, my wife, or child, I remind myself how lucky I am to be in a place where at least I can be sure we'll get the best of care.

Remember, Obama is the only one standing between evil capitalists and the mob with their pitchforks. I'd watch my back if I were Biden.

Financial scandal links US Ponzi schemes to the offices of a hedge fund owned by the son and brother of the US Vice-President, Joe Biden.
Before the Bidens took ownership [of Paradigm] it was associated with a Canadian fund that was later discovered to be a Ponzi scheme. And after the Bidens took over, it launched a joint venture with the cricket-loving Texas billionaire Allen Stanford's outfit, called the Paradigm Stanford Core Alternatives Fund. Hempton is at pains... to say he is not alleging the Bidens are crooks. Though he says their due diligence - before buying the fund and in its oversight of sales staff afterward - was sloppy. "There is no question that they housed within their doors a Ponzi, a fraud," Hempton says. Paradigm's links to Ponte Negra have received relatively little attention by the mainstream media, save a series on the Financial Times website. Hempton says... "If you can't trust a financial institution, it goes bust. People very close to the seat of power didn't show themselves to be very worthy of trust."

Oscar Wilde once wrote,

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Lord Darlington, Act III

The Austrians have just turned away.

Austria has announced that it will withdraw from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory... The announcement — just months before the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator — has left Austrian physicists stunned. "It is a black day for Austrian science," says Christian Fabjan, who heads the Institute for High Energy Physics at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna... Fabjan says the timing of the decision — roughly six months before the beginning of the LHC's first science run — couldn't be worse. "We have invested heavily in the construction of the LHC," he says. "It's bizarre."

Also of concern:

Recent "phishing" attacks. Over the last few weeks there has been a marked increase in the number of attacks on CERN made by cybercriminals. Typical attacks arrive in the form of e-mail messages purporting to come from the CERN Help Desk, Mail Service, or some similarly official-sounding entity and suggest that there is a problem with your account, such as it being over-quota. They then ask you to click on a link or to reply and give your password. Please don’t!

According to North Korea, everyone should:

reject the U.S. protective trade policy and establish a new fair international economic order... Proceeding from its selfish purposes, the U.S. is pursuing the protectionist policy in disregard of the demand of international laws and international economic relations and thus giving negative influence to the economic development of other countries and hindering the world economic development... The first victim of this policy is developing countries.

When even the ultra communist hermit kingdom thinks Obama isn't sufficiently in favor of free trade, what does that tell you?