Obama's Foreign Policy. I should kill someone.

I find this defense of Obama's foreign policy inexplicable. At one point, the author says Obama has crafted views on foreign policy similar to Henry Kissinger. You would think the candidate of Hope and Change and a new kind of politics would not have foreign policy views similar to Henry Kissinger. The problem is that when it came to Hope and Change in foreign policy, the Left's most hated person, George Bush, already tried to employ it. But because Bush is from Texas and is a born-again Christian, the Left couldn't never accept the idealism of Bush's cause. Because of their bigotry (yes, there is more bigotry on the left than the right), the Left rather than supporting Bush's idealistic cause, became foreign-policy realists akin to Nixon and Kissinger and the first George Bush. And so if Obama is a foreign policy realist, he is also a fraud. His appeal to the idealism of his star-struck supporters could not have caused the swooning it did if any of his hot airified rhetoric contained specifics or hard-headed realism.

The more I work, the more inexplicable I find human nature. Sometimes, you have to laugh and sometimes, you have to try to fight bitterness.

Some teachers must get their work ethic from the Special Olympics: it does not matter if you do it well as long as you show up eventually. These teachers must have seriously thought, before they came, that China had achieved some sort of socialist paradise so they could work like they were in a union. They must also get confused by the saying that "Mussolini made the trains run on time." They must also seem to think it means that only fascists insist on getting anywhere on time. The saying was said so as to show that Mussolini was good (i.e. because he could achieve an unquestioned good like trains running on time.). But leave it to people to think that those who want good are bad or that it is uncool to try to be good. "Don't you know that it fascist man?"

You also find some choice samples of human nature among the students. You will come across some little emperors or empresses: spoiled brats or bitches who should be beaten to an inch of their life.

I had one female princess ask me whether it was better for her to go to France or Italy. I should have told her to go to France because she would have fitted in with all the assholes who inhabit that country.

This summer, there has been another student who seems to hate foreigners or be spoiled or lord-knows-what. He is a student that all the other teachers talk about and he now has a reputation as someone you don't want to teach. I finally had him in a class this morning. I asked him where he went to school. He said he didn't want to tell me because he wanted it to be a secret. I had to laugh. The student wasn't a distraction or interrupting the class as a whole like other students I have seen. He would make his answers in turn, but his answers were just so bizarre. I would have to label him a little Red Guardist with rich parents who put him in a school where the teachers are capitalist/welfare-state foreigners. At the end of the class when I fielded questions from the class, he asked me why I was teaching in China. I told him it was an opportunity to see China which I found very interesting. He found my answer to be bizarre because it was the same answer the other teachers had given him when he asked them the same question. I have no idea what he really believes are our motives in coming here, but for whatever reason I would like to talk to him one-on-one. He will talk and his attitude seems to be a unique specimen thereof.