According to the Cat, the proverb - People in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones - is exactly the same in Chinese. It is not often English and Chinese proverbs are exactly the same.
There is another proverb in English which is - The Kettle Calling the Pot Black - which has a similar meaning in as much as... look at how black you might be yourself, before you criticise others.
It was actually good to see the cat laughing at the hole dear old Nursey has dug for herself with her ill-judged attack on the Hsinchu Mayor and the nonsense about his degree.
(Personally, I blame the Professor and his arse-backwards way of dealing with it, plus the KMT biased establishment of Tai Da swinging into action in a rather pathetic attempt to damage the DPP.) At least, that’s how it looks on the face of it…
All a bit sad for a University, presumably full of smart people, to manage to make itself look like an establishment puppet. But the likes of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK are part of the UK establishment, so it’s not dissimilar. (See here for my piece on The Establishment)
The Cat tells me an online friend did all the hard work in terms of digging out the details of the Naughty Nurse’s own thesis and did the cut-and-paste comparisons. So thanks to Secret Squirrel 2 as it made a change for me not to have to coax an angry Cat down from the ceiling, and see her laughing at this particular political farce instead.
It did bring to mind something that happened in my own career. I’m proud to say I was smart enough to head off the kind of mistake that Nursey has just made.
I was in the London Reuters Newsroom on the day Germany’s Bundesbank was due to decide on its base lending rates. Tension was high, the markets were waiting, billions would change hands in financial markets..it was a big news flash.
The flash came from most news agencies…Rates Unchanged… Reuters flashed 30 seconds later.. German rates raised.
Reuters got it right, the rest were wrong. It caused a considerable amount of turmoil in the financial markets and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
I was part of the team involved in that particular news-break and the next day an excited young Reuters marketing guy came to see me about a full page advert they wanted to put in the Financial Times about how Reuters had got the Bundesbank rate right, and the opposition had got it wrong.
I turned to my Reuters screen and typed in CORRECTED, and the screen filled up.
“Mate,” I said. “Next week it will be us…please don’t do this.”
We are all fallible. Most normal people realise that. Sometimes, perhaps, those who play political games think they are not human, are somehow special or somehow smarter and superior to the rest of us.
They are not…
A fall into a ditch makes you wiser… as the old Chinese proverb says.
Sadly, some in the political field are neither wise, or skilled in analytical thinking.
My late Mother used to say “They don’t have the brains they were born with.” To my mind, that is true wisdom.
Tinkerty Tonk
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