This is the seventy-sixth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.

Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.

In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.

The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.

Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.

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As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this chapter in the series includes videos and illustrative material.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
20 April 2026

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When observing the Shangsi Festival the ancients would
enjoy literary games by serpentine streams in the country.
Celebrating the blossoms they’d compose poems and drink.
On such occasions, relaxed joy accompanied the refinement.
This Shangsi people are in their offices doing lots of nothing.
And what do they actually get done on a day like this?
They squander a chance to enjoy the charms of spring.

古時上巳時節，郊野曲水流觴。
看花賦詩吃酒，風雅稀松平常。
今日又逢上巳，寫字樓里窮忙。
乾了多少正事？辜負無限春光！

— Lao Shu 老樹, trans GRB

The 19th of April 2026 was Shangsi Festival, or the Third Day of the Third Month of the Bingwu Year of the Horse 丙午馬年三月初三上已節. This painting and poem are taken from Lao Shu’s Calendar 老樹日曆. For more on the Shangsi Festival 上已節, see The Third Day of the Third Month — a chastening reflection.

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Other People’s Thoughts I-LXXV:

• Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage

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Other People’s Thoughts, LXXVI

Fact Checked

David Sedaris has complained, “Checking is like being fucked in the ass by a hot thermos.” One of his fact checkers considered the analogy and said, “If a thermos works, the outside wouldn’t be hot.”

— The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department, The New Yorker, 1 September 2025

Academia

the best kind of academic book has a clear central thesis and cryptic little insults about the author’s various rivals

— Seva Gunitsky

Lighting the Way

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

The Xi Jinping Formula

… some Leftists are tempted to claim that today’s China comes closest to such a mechanism of collective decisions which regulates and constrains the market, taking care of the long-term interests of our survival. I am ready to accept that China is at this moment the least bad of the three superpowers (China, the US, Russia), but I think that the non-transparency of its system contradicts the Confucian harmony advocated by China as its model of social relations. Just recall the latest mega-purges in the Chinese army (half of the entire supreme command was beheaded): did Xi not do this as a supreme predator acting without any public consultation? What we all need are such strong acts, but not accomplished in a predatory way – if this is the only way left to us, we are really lost.

— Slavoj Žižek, 5 April 2026

AI;DR

It’s cool that AI can fold proteins, create websites, fact-check journal articles, etc. but it can’t write anything that I am interested in reading. The problem isn’t that it hallucinates or makes mistakes. It’s that everything it writes vaguely sucks. I drag my eyes across the words and I feel nothing. That’s not quite right, actually—I feel like, “I would like this to be over as soon as possible.” When I see the ideas that the machines think are insightful, I wince. Talking to the computer is like taking a sip of scalding hot coffee: keep doing it and you’ll lose your sense of taste.

— Adam Mastroianni, Infinite midwit, 1 April 2026

… me vs. the machines should be no contest at all. I have not read the entire internet or even that many books. I do not have a team of Stanford PhDs working round the clock to make me better at my job. Nobody has invested $2.5 trillion in me. I should be lying dead somewhere in West Virginia, my heart burst open after losing to Claude Opus 4.6 in a John Henry-style showdown. Instead, I get to write my little posts because nowhere, in all those data centers, are the specific thoughts that happen to occur in the dumb hunk of meat ensconced in my skull.

— op. cit.

On April 18, government surveillance giant Palantir Technologies published a fascist manifesto on X. In response, I pointed out the screed’s flagrant fascism.

Among other things, it called for Silicon Valley elites to become a militant arm of the state and suggested imposing a system of compulsory military service.

Two days later, on April 20, I received notice that my X account has been permanently suspended. It was the most fascist response possible to a criticism of fascism—and on Hitler’s birthday, no less.

— Gil Durán, Purge Palantir: The Campaign Against Peter Thiel’s Spy Firm, The Nerd Reich, 21 April 2026

Nom nom Noma

You admit that during your visit to Noma in Copenhagen nearly none of the dishes were delicious, noting that mold, for the most part, tastes like nothing. Yet you left feeling intellectually stunned. This captures the modern shift: diners are no longer paying for the skill of the cook, but for the intellectual vanity of the guest. We have reached a point where the elite will pay enormous sums to be bored, or even disgusted, as long as the experience confirms their status as “morally enlightened.”

In the classical tradition of gastronomy, from Auguste Escoffier to Alain Chapel, the question was disarmingly simple: Does it taste good? That question carried an inherent integrity. In this new paradigm, the question is: Does it signify something? You correctly note that Noma’s prestige silenced those within it. But at Noma along with its conceptual colleagues, the “art” and the abuse are structurally codependent. The hyper-engineered aesthetics—the butterfly crackers and cultivated molds—require a level of invisible, high-pressure labor that can only be sustained through a feudal power structure. You cannot have the “purity” on the plate without the “brutality” in the scullery. One pays for the other.

— Sal Piper, An Open Letter to the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner. Re: Her Recent Article about Noma, 5 April 2025

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AI-enabled Racism

View this post on Instagram

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Bye bye Bondi

Pam Bondi didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid. She asked for the recipe, sourced the ingredients, and offered to make a second batch in case anyone wanted more.

She did everything. Public flattery. Grovelling obedience. Smug little TV performances. That revolting breathless tone these people get when they’re praising Trump like he’s some kind of misunderstood business genius, instead of what he actually is, which is a malignant narcissist in a spray tan who treats human beings like greasy napkins at a buffet. And for what? For the exact same ending he gives everybody. Used up. Spat out. Humiliated. Gone. …

Pam Bondi just found out the hard way that if you build your entire career on servicing a malignant toxic narcissist, don’t be shocked when it ends with your portrait face down in a rubbish bin next to a half drunk Diet Coke and somebody’s chicken salad container.

That’s not a tragic ending. That’s the most honest performance review she ever got.

— I Fucking Love Australia, Pam Bondi Begged. Trump Fired Her Anyway. Her Portrait Didn’t Even Make It To The Car Park., 4 April 2026

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Whitey on the Moon

[Note: Victor Glover was the pilot of the Artemis II mission in early April 2026. He was the first person of colour to travel to the vicinity of the moon. Glover previously told a reporter that he listened to Whitey on the Moon, Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 prose poem, twice a week on his commute to work.]

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Message from Beyond the Moon

“I don’t have anything prepared,” he began. “I think these observances are important, and as we are so far from Earth and looking back at the beauty of creation, I think for me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing,” he said.
“When I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us, who were created, you have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.

“I think maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special,” he continued. “In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist (in) together.”

“I think as we go into Easter Sunday thinking about all the cultures all around the world — whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not — this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are and that we are the same thing. And that we got to get through this together.”

— Victor Glover, Easter 2026

They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for. While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that’s where it ends. There’s no wall or — no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear.
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire, no, the need (fuelled by fervour) — to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright.

— Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Deus Vult: the Hegseth Heresy

On Monday, at a news conference touting the rescue of a crew member from a downed F-15 fighter jet in southern Iran, Hegseth once again invoked his religious beliefs to justify events as they transpired. “Shot down on a Friday, Good Friday, hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday and rescued on Sunday,” he said. “Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday, a pilot reborn.”

— Pete Hegseth

From Victory to Victory in Iran

Trump’s “victory timeline” claims.

Mar 3: “We won the war.”
Mar 7: “We defeated Iran.”
Mar 9: “We must attack Iran.”
Mar 9: “The war is ending almost completely, and very beautifully.
March 10: practically nothing left to target
Mar 11: “You never like to say too early you won. We won. In ​the first hour it was over.” Mar 12: “We did win, but we haven’t won completely yet.”
Mar 13: “We won the war.”
Mar 14: “Please help us.”
Mar 15: “If you don’t help us, I will certainly remember it.”
Mar 16: “Actually, we don’t need any help at all.”
Mar 16: “I was just testing to see who’s listening to me.”
Mar 16: “If NATO doesn’t help, they will suffer something very bad.”
Mar 17: “We neither need nor want NATO’s help.”
Mar 17: “I don’t need Congressional approval to withdraw from NATO.”
Mar 18: “Our allies must cooperate in reopening the Strait of Hormuz.”
Mar 19: “US allies need to get a grip — step up and help open the Strait of Hormuz.”
Mar 20: “NATO are cowards.”
Mar 21: “The Strait of Hormuz must be protected by the countries that use it. We don’t use it, we don’t need to open it.”
Mar 22: “This is the last time. I will give Iran 48 hours. Open the strait”
Mar 22: “Iran is Dead”
Mar 23: “We had very good and productive talks with Iran.”
Mar 24: “We’re making progress.”
Mar 25: “They gave us a present and the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.”
Mar 26: “Make a deal, or we’ll just keep blowing them away.”
Mar 27: “We don’t have to be there for NATO.”
Mar 28: No major quote
Mar 29: Claimed talks were progressing
Mar 30: “Open the Strait of Hormuz immediately, or face devastating consequences.”
Mar 31: Claimed a deal was “very close” and that Iran would “do the right thing”
Apr 1: “We’ll see what happens very soon.”
Apr 2: Repeated that a deal was likely, while warning of continued strikes if not
Apr 3: “Something big is going to happen.”
Apr 4: Said Iran must comply “immediately” or face further consequences.
Apr 5: “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
Apr 6 :a whole civilization will die
Apr 7: total and complete victory
Apr 8: objectives were met

— Donald Trump, compiled by Anthony Scaramucci, 9 April 2026

The government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.

— Pedro Sanchez, prime minister of Spain, 8 April
2026

Putting Mad in the Madman Theory 

Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.

— Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Right Amount of Crazy’, New York Review of Books, 14 May 2026

All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.

— Bertrand Russell

The War

The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

— Thích Nhất Hạnh 釋一行, 1967

If past atrocities had taught us anything, it’s that the problem is never just “the leader”. Look at those who follow him. The hands that clap. The mouths that incite. The bodies that obey. And above all, those who could stop it — and choose silence instead.

— Francesca Albanese

We are the only people in history who are expected to witness our own genocide, and then watch what we say so we don’t hurt the feelings of the people who did this.

— Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian-American scientist, writer and activist

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Get Out!

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“I want the last sound here to be music, not missiles and war.”

— Iranian musician Hamidreza Afrideh plays at the ruins of his old music school

Remember Avignon

Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon.

Colby’s message was pure mob. America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, he told Pierre. The Catholic Church had better take its side.

Then, during the same meeting, a senior U.S. official invoked the Avignon Papacy — a reference that should make every American’s blood run cold.

In 1303, King Philip IV of France dispatched his troops to Anagni to seize Pope Boniface VIII. The old pontiff was beaten, humiliated, and left for dead. He died weeks later from the injuries and the humiliation, and the French Crown then forced the papacy into a 70-year captivity in Avignon.

Let me make the subtext explicit: the historical episode Pentagon officials chose to hurl at the Vicar of Christ is the one that ended with a pope murdered by the state.

— Christopher Hale, There Will Be No Second Avignon, 9 April 2026

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Brave New 1984

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江心嶼

雲朝朝朝朝朝朝朝朝散，
潮長長長長長長長長消。

— 南宋王十朋對聯

On the Sale By Auction of Keats’ Love Letters

These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.
Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangel for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?

— Oscar Wilde

一枝花 The Flowering Branch

i got annoyed at someone who talked about “rhyme at the expense of accuracy” at AAS; this is the latest draft of the start of my response.

攀出墙朶朶花，折臨路枝枝柳。
花攀紅蕊嫩，柳折翠條柔，浪子風流。
憑著我折柳攀花手，直煞得花殘柳敗休。
半生來倚翠偎紅，一世裏眠花臥柳。

Intro (to “The Flowering Branch’)

I plucked the
Blushing blossoms peeping over garden walls,
(Broke off the)
Wayward willows listing in the lane – I plucked the pinkest, softest buds of all,
Bent over willow shoots and broke them off –
-Love the player, love the game.
These hands know what the pretty posies like.
I’ll pick and pluck them like they’ve never plucked before,
“Til all their petals flutter to the floor and all those willows quit their weeping and drip-dry.
Half my life in pleasure-quarter tete-a-tetes,
A whole career of tangling up with willows,
Of lying down on painted ladies’ scented pillows, And waking up in unfamiliar flower beds.

(from “Not Going Soft with Age” by the 13th c. poet and playwright Guan Hanqing, one of the tradition’s greatest masterpieces on the theme of It Still Works)

— Brendan O’Kane, 10 April 2026

The Pendulum

A hundred and fifty years ago, the day of the storming of the Bastille, the European swing, after long inaction, again started to move. It had pushed off from tyranny with gusto; with an apparently uncheckable impetus, it had swung up towards the blue sky of freedom. For a hundred years it had risen higher and higher into the spheres of liberalism and democracy. But, see, gradually the pace slowed down, the swing neared the summit and turning-point of its course; then, after a second of immobility, it started the movement backwards, with ever-increasing speed. With the same impetus as on the way up, the swing carried its passengers back from freedom to tyranny again. He who had gazed upwards instead of clinging on, became dizzy and fell out.

Whoever wishes to avoid becoming dizzy must try to find out the swing’s law of motion. We seem to be faced with a pendulum movement in history, swinging from absolutism to democracy, from democracy back to absolute dictatorship.

— Rubashov’s diary (20th day in prison), Darkness At Noon, 1940

可笑寒山道

— Han Shan, translated by Gary Snyder

人機協同？我小時候管這叫作弊！

Last year, I participated in a college short poetry competition and discovered there was an ‘AI track’ where you had to showcase the so-called ‘beauty of human-machine coordination’ (人機協同的美感). Human-machine coordination? When I was young, we just called that plagiarism.

I remember watching my classmates use their smartphones to search for answers during exams—human-machine coordination to get a good grade. I told myself: ‘Even though you feel challenged right now, you are developing skills that will be useful when you grow up.’ Then I grew up and discovered that human-machine coordination is the skill.

It feels like a new version of Wo xin chang dan (臥薪嘗膽). Imagine Gou Jian enduring years of tasting gall to plot his revenge, only to discover that Fu Chai was already eliminated by someone else. Humans finally get to relax, but all our suffering was for nothing (人輕鬆了，苦白吃了). In history, Gou Jian would just be remembered as a weirdo obsessed with eating gall.

— Chen Mingfei 陳鳴飛

Melania

Her power over Trump is to keep the ultimate narcissist in a permanent withholding pattern. Occasionally, their son Barron looms into shot like a blank, patent-haired giraffe. She seems to live alone in a world of mirrors.

— Tina Brown, Fresh Hell, 13 April 2026

Deborah Vance Drive

“It’ll probably be a dead end with an abortion clinic on it.”

— Deborah Vance, Hacks

皇帝夢

我從前也很想做皇帝，後來在北京去看到宮殿的房子都是一個刻板的格式，覺得無聊極了。所以我皇帝也不想做了。做人的趣味在和許多朋友有趣的談天，熱烈的討論。做了皇帝，口出一聲，臣民都下跪，只有不絕聲的Yes，Yes，那有什麼趣味?

— 魯迅,《關於知識階級》

我愤怒的不是强权，而是每一个接受这个强权的人

《易見》 專訪陳佩斯，主持人問道：這不是成人世界的遊戲(編者注：指接受現存的規則)嗎？

陳佩斯答：不，這個世界應該是有規矩的世界，我們在這麼爛的社會里已經生活了幾十年了，還要讓餘生這麼爛下去，多沒勁吶，咱換個好日子行嗎？我必須告訴他們，我是在被侵權，否則的話，五十年後，一百年後，後人看我們今天祖先是這麼生存的，他們會憤怒，他們的憤怒不是強權，而是每一個接受這種強權的人。我的後代一定會為我感到丟臉，所以我爭取不要讓後人嘲笑我。

陳佩斯的搭檔朱時茂回憶道：有一年，我們去北大，應邀即興說了個段子，叫背口訣。我說：六六。陳佩斯說：三六。我：七七。陳佩斯：四九。我：八九。佩斯：六四？？禮堂里死一般的沈寂。突然掌聲如山崩海嘯而至，每一個眼角都滿是淚花。

— 陳佩斯被封殺

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晚安大少爺李白

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Intermittent Immortality

The future of the world no longer disturbs me; I do not try still to calculate, with anguish, how long or how short a time the Roman peace will endure; I leave that to the Gods. Not that I have acquired more confidence in their justice, which is not our justice, or more faith in human wisdom; the contrary is true. Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man’s periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.

— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951

Scaling

To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.….Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves. ….

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.

— Noah Hawley, What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat, The Atlantic, 20 April 2026

All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

— William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

— Kurt Vonnegut, 1963

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