sheepdog: thou art not wrongeth. of course it was a show, but isn't every
olympics? (not to defend china, but take a gander at your 401k - living in
the mecca of capitalism?) china has some serious problems, agreed. they
certainly have a long way to go, not sure they'll make it, as it's already
been 5000 years. one major obstacle is the language. ask a kindergartener
how many letters, they all know...26. ask a chinese linguistics professor
how many characters....no one knows. good estimate is 60-70,000. you
need the most common 3000 to be moderately literate, so kids spend the
first 5-6 years learning characters, then memorizing words (combinations
of characters), then memorizing texts and quotes. doesn't leave much time
for creativity or originality or learning to think. which is why you can name
all the great contributions to science on one hand....gunpowder and paper
and a few others, but nothing in the last, oh 3000 years. which brings us
to....
pairadocs: you can argue with the tried-and-true, when most times it seems
to be tried-and-not-true. other than as a placebo effect, much of tcm in
my opinion is worthless. naturally, over 5000 years, just by trial and error,
you'll come up with some things that work, but mostly it seems to be
repetition of what was done before, which was done then because it was
done before, and not necessarily because it worked then or works now.
