Spraying in My Area; Experiencing State Power Up Close; Raining; Driver-Impatientiatus; No Lives Matter – No, Lives Matter; I Phone My Mom;

• If I hadn't looked out my window, I would have thought that an ice cream truck was driving on the road that our apartment overlooks. For the entire afternoon, I heard the music for "It's a Small World After All." But the music was coming from these large truck sprayers (picture here, here and here.) My son Tony thinks that they are spraying for the Covid Xi Jing Ping Chicom Bat Flu. (Others confirm this.)

• I felt the menace of state power as I walking to a bakery near Tony's school. What happened was this: I drove and dropped off Tony at his school. I then drove up the school road a bit and parked the car on the side of the road which was not too far from an intersection with the road where the bakery is located. I park there because the traffic on the road where the bakery is located is usually very heavy, and I think easier to merge into traffic from a spot where the nearby traffic is lighter. Of course, it does mean that I have to walk a few minutes to get to and from the Bakery and that I do worry about getting a parking ticket. But so far, no fines. This particular time, I walked onto bakery street and saw twenty uniformed security men walking in line ahead of me. They looked to be cracking down on obstacles to road and sidewalk traffic, such as parked cars, parked e-bikes and stands that the shops on the street might have put out. I noticed that one of security men in the lineup had a pad of yellow parking ticket stickers. Seeing this, I worried about my car being ticketed, and thought to go back to my car and not buy bread, till I thought that the men were all going away from my car, and I probably had enough time to buy bread and return to my car without any trouble. But I quickened my pace in a mild panic all the same. I soon was on the tail of the lineup of security men. To overtake them, I went up stairs that lead to the shop entrances and walked along the entrances till I was past the lineup. I then descended back to the street level, and took a crosswalk to get to the bakery. When I had made my purchases, I went back to the crosswalk just as the line of security men had almost finished using it. At the tail end of the lineup, I saw a security man who surely was the leader of the group. I looked him in the face and saw that he had very severe looking eyes. Guys like him are a dime a dozen in China, but they are the ones who keep the regime in power.

• It's been raining the last two weeks. What can I say about it? It don't like it, but it's good for the farmers.

• An extreme case of drive- very-impatientiatus on the road where I had parked my car to buy bread. I had dropped off Tony and was cruising down this road to get to the intersection where I would make a right turn, when a white car passed me on the right, and then scared me for an instant. The white car was in the bicycle lane when it was passing my car and just ahead of our two cars, was another car parked in the bicycle lane. I grimaced because it looked like there was going to be a collision. The white car got ahead of me and veered to barely avoid hitting the parked car. If I hadn't instinctually slowed down, the white car could easily have hit my car. Needless to say, this driver raised my ire and I thought of lots of foul-languaged ways to describe him and other drivers from his race. I watched the white car continue on ahead and make more impatient and aggressive maneuvers. There wasn't a chance that I was going to get beside that car and see who was driving, but I am certain that it was a man. As I have said repeatedly in this blog, the locals are very impatient. But this driver was on the tail distribution of local impatience. But the driver behavior is not rare. I have seen many cars weaving in traffic so impatiently that I feel compelled to write about them in my blog or to try my best to annoy by getting in their way.

• One of my favorite retorts to the Black Lives Matter talk is to assert that No Lives Matter, Everyone is bad and Everyone should go boil their heads... Well, not so much assert as to post a meme saying that, except it uses more saucy and crude language. On a Canadians in China WeChat group, some person was posting how all the Prime Ministers currently depicted on Canadian currency have said things that would today be denounced as racist. I felt compelled to respond. So I posted a image of our current PM in blackface and the No Lives Matter meme. It immediately got a thumbs down from someone. I wonder if this someone thought that people were all good or hated the meme because it was a riposte to Black Lives Matter. Someone else then said that you can find things wrong with everyone if you tried hard enough. I thought that this someone else, even if he was on my side, was an idiot. You have to try hard to find flaws in people? What planet or bubble are you living in? Geez. The person who had thumbs-downed my meme, then responded my doing something to my meme. The No Lives Matter meme was changed to a No, Lives Matter. This person must have thought it was clever, but he was making the point the many have tried to make to the idea of Black Lives Matter, that all lives matter. Apparently, this fellow never got the memo that saying just Lives Matter or All Lives Matter is also considered to be racist.

• Phoned my Mom and I got depressing news. First, an aunt of mine had to be airlifted from Flin Flon to Winnipeg for some medical emergency. I pray that Auntie Edith survives. My mother also had the basement of her house flood, again. This time, it was because of a very heavy and intense rain that hit Brandon the day before I phoned her. 150 mm fell in five hours!! Lots of streets and basements and stores flooded in Brandon, including my mother's. I feel bad for my mother, and ashamed of myself because I am so impotent on the other side of the world and can't do anything to help her, beyond send my best wished and express my sumpathy. Thankfully, my brother Ron will be able to drive out from Winnipeg to help her, but his July 1^st holiday will be ruined.

Either All Lives Matter or No Lives Matter!

With current events continuing to lower my estimation of mankind*, I am inclining to tend to the latter opinion.

All people are bastards and they can all go boil their heads! No group of people is entitled to special victimhood status. We're all victims and we're all bigots. And what bigots have to say about other people is on the whole, mostly true.

As a wannabe Catholic, I have compelled to support the former choice in the title of this blog entry. I am also, a bit of a reactionary, and I do see the necessity of hierarchies. Every life matters in its proper place.

* And that's quite a feat since I like to think of myself as a misanthrope.

Tales From Parking Clown world; TM's Are Really BM's; PWSFC19STs; Father's Day; Tony Wants to Know about the TSM

• Nothing demonstrates the utter barbaric selfish anti-civilizational thoughtless tendencies of the chicom-led mainland Han Chinese more glaringly obviously than the way they park their private motor cars. (which as a society they weren't capable of building till western man, in a fit of suicidal altruism coupled with cosmopolitan businessman greed, decided to show them how to do) What I just said shouldn't be controversial because I can offer witness that the Chicom authorities have to do some forceful things to get their subjects to park civilizationally.

• Rare readers of my blog, who understand my ramblings and have looked at photos I have put in my photoblog, may be aware that there is an area, between the apartment complex housing Compound Kaulins and a nearby shopping mall, where I like to wander and gawk at the locals' insane and selfish parking. The locals park on this long L-shaped road to avoid having to pay for parking at the mall and other nearby plazas. No space on this road will not be parked upon, and the end result the road becomes a narrow gauntlet barely wide enough for a car, looking for a parking spot, to go through. Just after we bought our car, my wife Jenny will actually try to park there. But driving through there was such a pain that she had to relent. There are always these stand-offs between cars going down the gauntlet from opposite directions.

• Well, after all these years, the authorities, just last week, have decided to crack down on the parking jungle that area had become. I noticed something was going on in the area when I happen to see it from the bus I had just gotten on to go to work. The lack of cars in the area was very noticeable. And when I saw the same lacking the next day, I suspected that something was happening, like a crackdown. So in the evening, I decided to walk along the road and see what was occurring. I saw the parking space lines had been freshly painted on one side of the road and cars were only parked in those spaces. When I got to the end of my walk along the road, I saw six security guards and my suspicions were confirmed. I then wondered how and why this crackdown had started. Who would have made the decision in the vast local chicom bureaucracy to do this? And what were their motivations? Was it because they were as disgusted as this laowai was at the civilizational aspects of it? Or was it because they needed the parking spaces? The road borders some government buildings it does.

• To be honest, I have to hand it to the chicoms in this instance. In the west, many leaders seem content to let the selfish portions of their populations vandalize and loot; in chicom-led China, I am seeing the smack of firm governance as they deal with selfish parkers.

• My other parking anecdote is a tale of witnessing a local trying to parallel-park. As I was walking from the bus-stop to my workplace, I saw this local trying to squeeze his car into a lined parking space where the cars on either side had gone over the lines. So, I was witnessing and am now recounting a tale of three morons unable to park: two of whom I couldn't see but whose results of their efforts I could, and the one right in front of me who was daring to park where wiser parkers, of the likely more westernized variety, wouldn't.. Not wanting to be a like the local looky-Lu's, I didn't stop to see if the driver successfully park his car. The last I saw was that he had gotten his rear end as close to one car's front end as he could without touching it, his front end was sticking out into traffic. Gawking, looky-Lu-ism is a Chinese habit which I try to resist adopting.

• With so many idiots like this in China, how can we be letting these people eat our lunch? It is no wonder I am so reclusive. Idiots goddamn everywhere and in every quarter of Wuxi.

• Another word for tiger-mothers: bitch-moms. I think it is more apt.

• A nice long epithet to describe the people responsible for the lockdowns: Pantywaisted snow-flaked covid-19 shit-tyrants. (PWSFC19STs)

• I really shouldn't be telling you anything but what I am witnessing in this blog; and I really shouldn't be telling you my ignorant opinions or anything about my personal life. But I can't help myself and the chances are, no one is reading this blog anyway. So I will mention that my son gave me a hug on Father's Day which was nice. We then watched two episodes from the fabulous World at War Series from the 1970s. Nothing like watching war documentaries with your son.

• Tony asked me to download a documentary about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. I wonder if this will be easy to do from within China.

I'm Stuck on Planet Stupid People

• This entry is about things other than my wife's tiger-mothering.

• I asked three students if they could they tell me the last time they got angry. One student was able to tell me; two others told me that "they couldn't remember!" I have gotten the "I can't remember" answer so often in my time teaching in China that I have to wonder how it is that they say East-Asians have such high IQ's. Not letting that answer go, I mocked the students by asking them if they remembered their names, and if they had had breakfast. One student was puzzled by my question, sighing aloud as he answered before he then realized what I was doing. I am just checking your memory, I told him.

• Another student is really scared of the virus. She isn't letting her daughter go to kindergarten. And she also happens to have a husband working in Sweden. Because of Sweden's more relaxed response to the virus, she and her husband are angry at each other because she doesn't want to stay with him in Sweden.

• I see someone wearing a face mask as they were driving in car without passengers.

Something's Got to Give

• Monday and Tuesday night, Tony didn't go to bed till 11:20 PM and 11:00 PM respectively because my wife Jenny was tiger-mothering him. If I protest, it will result in violence. But it is hard for me to stand by while she is doing this because she is loud when she is doing it and she is loud for hours on end. I can't escape her noise by reading, watching a tv episode or a movie, listening to a podcast, or plugging my ears. I do try praying. The effect of her screeching on me is that I get very agitated. I feel like a person stuck on a bus or on a airplane with a crying baby. And despite being exposed to this for six years, I can never get used it. On Tuesday evening, I was fighting a tension headache and spasm thoughts of violence. I didn't act on the latter but I got back at my wife by walking around naked and turning my glance away from her. When she called me an idiot for walking around naked, I said I agreed with her that I was an idiot. This got her annoyed and she ended the evening by her yelling "fuck your family off!"

• She then said she wanted a divorce after Tony finished middle school. If I was paid for every time, Jenny said the "d" word, I would have enough money to make her happy.

• Jenny tells me she goes through her tiger-mothering essentially because she doesn't want to lose face if Tony is the worst student in class. The way I see it, she is making the lives the people, she should be caring about: her husband and her son, a living hell so as to not look bad in the eyes of people who don't give two fucks about us. These people don't like Tony because he is not one of them and don't want him to succeed. They would rather he went away.

• How is my son Tony doing? He is rather sullen these days. His only escapes are the phone and computer games he likes, but Jenny has it that he is to feel guilty about playing on these things. I feel ashamed at the narrow life he leads here in China. He's never used a screwdriver, never used a hammer, never swam in a river, never did any physical work, never did anything that a boy striving to a man should do.

• I would go to Canada tomorrow if I could. Problem is I can't. It is not even an option to try to improve my situation in China. It is very hard and expensive to change schools now in China, and I hate dealing with paperwork.

• "Oh! It's for his future!" some idiots would say. To which I respond, they never define what they mean by "da future." The future when it comes will be lived in the present. And when it comes, how will we know it is the future we hoped for? The future I had hoped for, many years ago, was one where I would not be scared to come home because it would enduring horrible evenings of having to listen to my wife be angry at me or my son about things that aren't worth getting mad about because they will pass. The future will become past as well, so we might as well try to make good memories in the present moment as much as we can.

Things I Have Been Thinking

• I guess I would be a thought criminal to the powers that be. As perhaps the following thoughts will perhaps show.

• I have said this before in a previous entry, the news I am getting about what is going on in Europe and North America is upsetting. It is absolute insanity. Now there always has and always will be a portion of the population that is insane. But what is really upsetting about what is going on is how so many of the elites share in this sanity or seem cynical enough to want to go along with it.

• The question is what can be done about it? Logic and clever argumentation, presenting the facts, and appealing to a sense of fair play aren't going to work. The people pushing this anti-racism nonsense are either so firm in their sense of their goodness, or are so evil that they have to be fought to the death like we did with the Nazis and should have done with the Bolsheviks. There seems to be no peaceful way out of this period of insanity the West has entered into except to submission to some 1984-Communist-Nazi thought control regime. That sort of regime would be sheer evil so these anti-racist tyrants have to be fought.

• So, Leftism and Progressivism are dead-ends. And thus, one must ask what sort of regime can we reasonably hope to see come into being? I would say, in short, a regime that doesn't produce Leftism or Progressivism of any sort. But what kind of regime is that? One that isn't democratic or at least a very limited democracy for one thing. Women and people incapable of paying taxes shouldn't be allowed to vote. [How about a simple reform like this: people who go on welfare, are not allowed to vote?] The elites of this regime have to care for their people and only their people. One of problems of the world now is that the elites are globalist, and so there are few of them that care about the hometowns they abandoned so they could become cosmopolitan. How to get the elites to care about their people and to stop hob-knobbing with other elites is the real problem with the world at the moment. To get them to stop trying to fight the "ether" of racism, a non-existent problem as it were, would be a start. But, alas, the powers that be in the world seem determined to lead the world over a cliff.

• What do I think of Trump? I would like to say that I have to been agnostic about Trump, but the truth is I was a never-Trumper when it first looked like he had a serious chance to be the Republican nominee, but as the process went along I became a never-never-Trumper, then a Trump supporter and I now hope that he can win the election this fall. Trump deserves to be criticized, but because of the over-the-top opposition from never-Trumpers, I am reluctant to criticize him. When I hear of the people who think he is a Nazi, a racist, a mad man and that somehow Obama was a capable president, one has no choice but to stand with Trump. The people whose views of Trump I can take seriously are those of the people who voted for him and are disappointed by him. Like them, I wish Trump would have done more to advance the agenda of his election campaign, and I wish he could have done more to advance the correct notions he had of dealing with the virus crisis and the riots. But it may well be that the elites and powers that be are against him, and that the system is going to have to collapse because it can't be saved and isn't worthy of being saved. So, Trump in 2020 because you are insane.

• What is going on in the world? Protests against racism? No, not that. What's going on seems to a demand for a redneck pogrom.

• If I saw someone kneeling for George Floyd, I hope I would have the wherewithal to kick the kneeler in the ass.

• 'You don't understand what it is to be a black or yellow or brown man!" They say. As if, these people understand what it is like to be a white man. It hasn't been a bed of roses for me. I have experienced shunning from people of every shade of skin color. When I was growing up, I was cruelly treated by my classmates, who shared the color of my skin. For all people, life is about putting up with annoying people who don't like you.
  

Things I Have Experienced and Seen Recently

• Teaching a company class on a Wednesday, one of the students managed to mention the Huawei woman. That is, the Chinese woman in Canada that the Americans are trying to extradite. The student said that this woman, whose name I can't be bothered to learn, is popular in China. Not in the mood to debate, I demurred on what the student said, except to make a Sergeant Schultz (from Hogan's Heroes) imitation.

• And I had to get a ride home from this student after class. On the ride after this class, she said to me that the Riots happening now in America could never take place in China. I pushed back against this, though I didn't bring up the cultural revolution and the riots that had happened in Xinjiang to name a few. I told her that if China had a hundred million blacks, there would be lots of rioting in China.

• On a Saturday morning, I saw a young woman get kicked off the bus because she didn't have a face mask. I first noticed the girl standing at the bus stop. She was cute and pretty. I felt guilty about noticing this and so I wasn't initially going to wait at the bus stop she was at, but then I saw the bus she was waiting for coming down the road. On a Saturday morning, I am in a bit of a hurry and so I take the first bus that is going in my general direction (on other days when I have more time, I take the 25 bus.), and so it was that I got on the same bus as this girl. I noticed she hadn't a mask when she boarded. I then saw the driver get her heck for this as she used her bus card to pay her fare. The girl seemed or was pretending (this is China!) to be surprised. She took a seat. The bus went down the road. The driver then slowed down and asked the girl about a mask. He then kicked her off the bus. She got off sullenly but without much protest. If I was on the ball, I thought afterwards, I could have given her one of the many masks I had with me. If I had had balls, I would have protested at the stupidity of the driver's actions. For there weren't that many people on the bus at the time. But it would have been too much of a hassle.

• It's monsoon season in Wuxi now (or the plum rains as the locals say) and so my drive to take Tony to school I saw four things worth mentioning:

1. I first saw very heavy rain. I had to keep the wipers on max speed as I drove. Being in the rain meant an instant soaking. It was that heavy.

2. I was making a right turn at an intersection, I have referred to a recent entry, where cars making U-turns can really block traffic. This time, there were no u-turners but there was all sorts of smashed metal crates and boxes and metal pieces strewn all over the road. I had to slow down so as to not take such a wide turn and thus avoid the debris. I immediately wondered how this pile of debris had come to be. But then I looked straight ahead and I saw a truck stopped, its four-way blinkers on, and with one of its doors not closed properly. I occasionally see loads falling off e-bikes and small three-wheel wagons, so it shouldn't be a surprise to see it happen to a truck.

3. From the debris pile, I had to drive to my wife's office building where she told there was a package for me to pick up in her office. To do this meant having to drive into an underground parking garage and park close to the elevator that would take me to Jenny's 16^th floor office. This went off without a hitch. What then I observed, was the amount of water that had collected near the parking garage exit gate. A pedestrian would have needed boots to get through it. Drainage is not something the local builders have dealt with very well thanks to their habit of constructing things hastily and in a slip-shod manner.

4. Driving to the intersection near my house, I saw a bus stopped in an unusual manner: It was stopped as it was in process of making a turn and had its hazard lights blinking. I wondered that was the delay. I drove closer and saw an e-bike lying on the ground in front of the bus. I drove still closer and saw an e-biker lying on the ground as well. I then knew what had happened: the bus was making a quick right and the e-biker was trying to get through the intersection. The collision was the result of the impatience of the local bus drivers and e-bikers. I reckon I have seen hundreds of these sort of vehicle-bike collision aftermaths in my time.

• The news of the cancellations of Gone with the Wind, and the German episode of Fawlty Towers caused me to download the movie and the series off the Internet. I showed my son Tony the German episode of Fawlty Towers and he laughed so much that now he wants to watch all the episodes of the series. [The actual part of the episode that caused it to be cancelled or withdrawn, were of these remarks made by a doddering old major character about East and West Indians that were absolutely hilarious. The Britain of these doddering old majors was a more civilized place than now, even with those "racist" observations.]

• I should be more insane than I am. I live in an environment where I endure pangs of social isolation and where there are no real opportunities for social interaction in which I can feel I am with kindred souls. I do keep myself busy best I can and thankfully, I have Tony & Jenny to keep me on the straight and narrow because I do have duties that I must perform. When I was younger, I did give into these feelings of loneliness in a big way, but I now look with contempt on my younger self for having done so. Still, in my older years, I act strangely sometimes. I will not talk to people who annoy me. I will strike many people as cold. But to be fair to myself, I'll say that dealing with others does involve me having to tolerate so much nonsense, that at a certain point I snap. And on a few occasions, I have lost my temper at people; but mostly I try to deal with them by giving them the silent treatment. Am I being solipsistic? I hope not, but I surely must be, since I write a blog. So, I can't deny it. In fact, I think I am with people who are in fact more solipsistic than I actually am. I also realize that there is nothing that these people can do for me, and it is immature to think they can. (I say this because currently there are only two other foreigners I see in Wuxi, and I don't talk to them much at all.) So, as you can see, I am only partially insane!

• The company has told us to avoid people from Beijing. Outbreak of the virus at some market there apparently.

I Feel Like Rioting; Seven Days, Four Classes; The US is Still the World's Cultural Superpower; What Can Be Said about Prime Minster Trudeau Kneeling?; An attempt at defining racism; Maybe I am the Alienated Type; And Other Thoughts

• I should ignore the news. It makes me despair to see how so many people can be so stupid. But I have been affected by what is in the news (the virus lockdown) and surely the life I have now will have to come to an end. It angers me that the students I have been able to talk to were able to go back to work in late February, three months earlier than I did. It is enough to make me want to riot. But the problems with me doing are that I am in the wrong country to do that (China is not my country) and that the people, who are rioting now, are rioting against the wrong things. I don't want to be associated with them in any way.

• Seven days of work, I have had four classes. I don't see how the school can change this because it looks like the market for English instruction is going to dry up until China and the World can have another detente.

• In the previous blog entry, I said that I really didn't know what to make of the world-wide demonstrations against the George Floyd death. The Z-man who blogs and podcasts from Baltimore had this to say about the public demonstrations and protests and even riots that have taken place outside of the USA on account of the incident: there really isn't much happening in these countries if they have to spend so much time obsessing on what is happening in the USA. I would add that it shows how powerful the US's cultural influence is still in this supposedly globalized world. (And China has a long way to go to ever catch up to it. The last great Chinese cultural import was Bruce Lee and he never spent any time on the mainland. I say it in another way: Mainland China only exports cheap manufactured stuff but no culture.) As a Canadian in China, I will say that I spend more of my time over here following what is going on in the US rather than in Canada and that I am obsessed as much with the US as any foreigner could be. I had attributed my obsession to that fact that I am from Canada and that the USA plays such a big role in Canadian culture and that the two countries have a common language. But it seems that many Europeans have the same obsession.

• Canadians have an inferiority complex because of the United States and its cultural power. And the Z-man's barb against other places having not much happening can certainly be applied, without a doubt, to Canada. And so, it shouldn't surprise me nor upset me that CTV news app that sends me news headline updates from Canada tells me that PM Trudeau made a public show of kneeling against racism. But PM Trudeau has a quality like bad Chinese drivers: I can't stop being irate at what they do. Does PM Trudeau really believe that this kneeling is going to help race relations or is he really secretly cynical and doing this because it helps him hold onto power? This is what his gesture if translated to government policy would result in: more non-white people having less moral agency, more real racism, more violence, more crime, more anarcho-tyranny, more taxes, less freedom, higher cost of living, less community, more atomized individuals, more murder sprees, more vandalism, less initiative, less charity, less purpose in life, less knowledge of the transcendent, more rioting, more looting, and more left-wing struggle sessions, .....

• What is racism? If it is strictly making incorrect judgements about people because of the color of their skin, then I am against it. If is making judgements about people because of the color of their skin, then I am for the correct and against the incorrect applications of it. And so, I ask: are these the definitions of racism that the anti-racism movement of the world now is railing against when it says it is against racism? I don't think so. Some have begun to say that the anti-racism movement is racism against white people. And they are probably correct...

• An interesting writer, whom I have most recently come upon, says that are three types of men: leaders, followers and the alienated. I'm am probably a combination of the latter two and in the weakest way possible: I just try to be fly on the wall. Flies on the wall as far as I can tell, don't talk to anyone and lurk. (Reminds of a time in my life where a jarring put-down was to call a person a lurker.)

• Following the news, I see it is a good time to be alienated. [Written at the time of George Floyd.]

• Saturday, I had one class to teach. I taught the class as soon as I arrived at school and basically had nothing to do ('cept some class planning) for the rest of the day.

• Time like this, I think about making my diet as simple and inexpensive as possible. Jenny spoils me in a way and it is making me weak.

• Tony has taken a liking to Chris Farley. He wants to watch all the deceased comedian's movies and SNL appearances.

• Am I missing sports ball? Not so much, but my son Tony is.

• Safeco Field in Seattle. I remember how the area around it seemed blighted. That is, it was like a new apartment complexes and new hotels in China which always seem incongruous with their surroundings.

• I know a person who is nice enough, but when it comes to politics, he is like a shitlib right out of central casting. In these perilous times, I've decided to avoid him because I don't want to have to heard his crap which would result in two possibilities: I avoid confronting about his nonsense or I do confront him: either way it would be painful but the former would be more because that is my habit.

• At least I can be honest myself about something.

• I wonder if there are expats in Wuxi who would feel compelled to take the knee against racism. I have to admit that I was fantasising about scenarios where a group of expats did try to this and ask me to join, and I told him no, saying I only kneeled for Jesus Christ. I further imagined myself being articulate and righteous, and further telling them off.

• To give Tony a taste of what rioting is like, I found a video of the 1992 LA riots to show him. He was taken back by the footage of the looters and of the blacks attacking and beating up white drivers.

• Tony & I enjoyed flipping through this book on the most important battles in history.

• The chicoms are of course gloating about the riots in America. But if any local said this to me, I would ask how the chicoms would deal with the blacks if they had them in China, and what advice they would have to give Americans to deal with their blacks. I bet the chicoms wouldn't, because their way of dealing with pesky minorities has been to put them in camps or shot them. The local could say all sorts of things about government programs to help but the Americans have tried all that.

More Thoughts on the Minneapolis Riots

• What is going on now in the States seems to have a bit of a resemblance to what was happening in China during the Cultural Revolution: half of those in power in America are encouraging the madness because they seem themselves benefitting from it. Either that or they are really stupid enough to think that self-destruction is the right thing. (Another interesting take I came upon was how the riots were the Left's 2020 Tet Offensive: a last desperate attempt to discredit Trump.)

• Minneapolis, from what I saw and heard, went out of its way to be anti-racist. And the end result? A race riot.

• Why are people outside of the USA protesting what happened in Minneapolis? That is probably what has surprised me most about what has happened. Is anti-racism the new religion of Westerners?

• I now consider myself to be an anti-anti-racist. From my vantage point, it seems that anti-racists are bigger hypocrites and liars than racists. And I will say this about racists: they don't hate people or others because of the color of their skin. What they hate is how these others behave and what they believe. These thoughts come to me as I recall that Malcom X said he rather deal with a southern redneck than a white liberal; David Warren saying that bigotry should be celebrated because what it says about most of humanity is true; and the Z-man saying racism is not the huge problem some say it is.

• Another take that stood out to me, as I was surfing the internet about the troubles in the USA was someone saying that because of the riots, they can understand how the Joker movie grossed over a billion dollars last year. Tony & I eventually saw the movie, and I was pleased to report that Tony actually found the movie appalling. He found the way the Joker character behaved in the film to be inexplicable. I found the film manipulative and lacking in subtlety, and verging on Grade B plot wise. That others could find the film inspiring (in a way) is scary. You really had to have low IQ to take the film seriously.

• The CTV News App I have on my phone sent an update saying the Obama was going to address the nation about the riots happening in America. I am no fan of Obama as someone who has read my blog may have garnered. So the update put me in a dark mood and got me to think the following about a possible Obama speech. I say that I can't see him having any new thoughts or insights to offer on the issue of race in America that he hadn't already offered in the campaign that got him elected in 2008. If he really wanted to do some good, he would have to change his thinking. And that would mean denouncing the forces that lead to his election in the first. In other words, he would have to repudiate the voters who elected him and gave him his position of eminence in the first place. He would thus have to say something really courageous and true. But he will instead try some emotional gimmick that would get him praise for being courageous and profound from the people responsible for the rioting.

• How is it say, the Chicoms, that is okay for Trump to shoot at rioters on the streets of America but not for them to shoot at "rioters" on the streets of Hong Kong? A simple, but nonetheless true way to look at is, that the shooters in America would be the good guys, and the shooters in Hong Kong would be the bad guys. As well, if the truism that the only good commie is a dead commie is true, which of course it is, then the communists are the rioters in America and the communists are the powers that be in Hong Kong. And as far as I know, the protestors in Hong Kong haven't done that much looting and really haven't been rioters in the way that the thugs on the streets of America have been. (Do the Chicoms think it is thus okay for the authorities to shoot rioters in America? Do the Chicoms also think that it is okay for Americans use guns to defend their property?)