What is Racism?; All Lives Matter versus Black Lives Matter; I Try Not to Wear a Mask; A Trip to An Expat Bar; Scan-codes are Barbarous!; Prospects for Playing Baseball with Tony this Summer; Wuxi is Having Its Wettest Month Ever

• I did an evening Speaker's Corner on Racism. I asked the group assembled what they thought Racism was. An older lady said Racism was like when white people hated black people. I told her she just gave me the strict BLM definition of racism and then asked her if that was what she meant and she answered that her definition was not so strict.

• I asked my Chinese audience if they preferred say Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter. They all said the latter.

• I try not to wear a Covid face mask if I can help it. The only time I do wear one is when it is required like getting on the bus and the subway, or entering a store that has this requirement. Otherwise, I don't. In fact when I am on the bus, I pull the thing down onto my Adam's apple as soon as I have passed the bus driver. When I get off the bus, I make a point of immediately taking the mask off and putting it away in my bag with a hope that people notice me doing so.

• I went to the local Wuxi Expat Bar. I took Tony there to celebrate the end of his school year with pizza, fries and beer (just for me). I didn't really talk to the Expats who were there. I did know and recognize some of them through social media and through long ago personal encounters.. I could only observe that some things never change. As luck would have it, I talked to someone just as I was leaving. He noticed my Minnesota Wild t-shirt and we got to talking about the coming NHL playoffs which I learned from him are going to take place in August. I also learned that he was married to a Chinese woman and had a young child. I warmed him of the transformation of his wife when the child becomes of school age.

• I had thought to put swearing in the title for this bullit (or is it bullet?), but then thought better of it. Tony & I went to the Ikea to buy hot dogs. We walked to the cashier and they told us we had to use our phones to scan a code and make an order. I went through the process but it didn't work, and so Tony & I decided to heck with it, and not bother. I hope this costs Ikea business. (That and it has probably gone BLMish and cowardly, anyway!) I just want to be served by humans and tell them to hold the vegetables in the hot dogs! (For some reason, unfathomable to me, the Wuxi Ikea puts vegetables in the hot dogs, and it is a pain to try to get them not to do this.)

• On a Sunday, the temperature was in the mid-thirties centigrade in Wuxi. And it was very humid. Not the kind of weather to play baseball in, I thought. And then, apropos of nothing, Tony told he was hankering for a session of catch and trying to hit the ball with a baseball bat. And then we went to a sporting goods store where they do sell baseball bats. Tony asked for and get a new baseball bat. And the next day it rained. And he really wanted to go out and try hitting balls with it.

• It has been the wettest summer on record, someone at school said.

A Woke Podcast; Rain in Wuxi, Rain in Brandon; Putting Down the Masks; Trump-Hater Boycott; Cutting Corners

• I listen to podcasts of a dissident or reactionary persuasion, so it really jars me when I hear something "woke" being said in a podcast. I was listening to a locked-in podcast about the Houston Rockets. I was interested, on account of my son Tony, about what the Rockets schedule would be when they resumed play. This was fine. But then they had to make a point of saying how concerned they were about "social issues" and were donating money to organizations created to deal with them. I immediately wanted to delete the podcast and never listen to another episode. Why did they have to make mention of politics? Sports is meant to be an escape from all the bullshit. But no, they had to show they cared! I was reminded of the crap I heard while I was in the bathroom at the Minnesota Twins baseball stadium, and a recorded message was played telling patrons how "woke" the baseball organization was about things like the environment and gender issues.

• It rained 95 mm in one day in Wuxi and it resulted in some flooding. Still, it was nothing like the 150 mm that fell in five hours in Brandon, Canada where my Mom lives.

• More and more, I see people putting their masks down off their face so that it just covers their neck. I have seen this on buses and the subway. With so much humidity, the mask merely adds to the suffering.

• I was so annoyed at the riots in the USA, that I stopped talking to one Canadian I know here. I wasn't interested in hearing his take on what was going on there. This guy is from the Trump-is-a-racist crowd. (But that kind of isolates, so I may have to contact him out of curiosity.)

• I hope Trump can win the election later this year. Like it or not, he is the one we have to cheer for, if we love Western Civilization and Christendom and general human decency.

• I may have said something in this blog about how the local drivers like to cut corners when they make turns, instead of making a perpendicular turn around the end of their turning lane. I think it is a selfish habit indicating a lack of skill, patience and consideration for others on the part of local drivers. I saw another extreme example of this by the driver of the car in the parking spot next to ours at our apartment complex. To set the scene in your mind, I will tell you that there are three parking spots between two columns. All cars back into their parking spot. So, from the driver's perspective, I have the parking spot, of the three, that is on the right and the right column is on the passenger side of our vehicle. The car next to us is the middle. One school morning, Tony & I were walking to our vehicle. The driver next to us had gotten to her car first, and she was pulling out of her parking spot. With no car on her left, she had her steering wheel cranked all the way to the left (which was the direction in which the parking garage entrance was.) It would have been very easy for a car coming from behind the right column to hit her, because that column does create a blind spot. But the locals only think of what is straight ahead of them and never think of what is all around.

Songs My Son Tony drums to:

Spirit Walker by the Cult

Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones

That'll Be the Day by Buddy Holly

Amorena by Elton John

A Little Less Conversation by Elvis Presley

Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana 

I don't care much for Tony drumming to Nirvana.  Having to listen to them after all these years, I can hear that they were awful.

The Scum of the Earth. The Worst Sort of People Are:

Atheists

Talmudists

Feminists

Pornographers

Socialists

Globalists

Cosmopolitan businessmen

Usurers

Pharisees

Criminals

Anti-Racists

Sentimentalists

Purveyors of Scientism

Materialists

Tattooists

Chinese drivers.

Notes:

The list is not comprehensive. For example, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives haven't been listed.  And I see that I didn't say anything about Climate Change Hypers.

Communists and Nazis are socialists.

Bigots would be on the list, but I wouldn't want to insult them by lumping them in with anti-racists.

I like to classify myself as a reactionary.

Tony Finishes School; My Childhood Was So Much Better than Tony's; Bring Back the Sabbath; Went to the Wuxi Airport, A Van Driver Gets His Comeuppance from Me; SM off Youtube; Senior Students at my Speakers Corners

Tony Finishes School; My Childhood Was So Much Better than Tony's; Bring Back the Sabbath; Went to the Wuxi Airport, A Van Driver Gets His Comeuppance from Me; SM off YouTube; Senior Students at my Speakers Corners

• Tony finishes school on the 11^th. That be July 11^th. So, at the start of July, my wife Jenny is tiger-mothering him to the hilt. His general demeanour has been one of general moroseness and tiredness.

• I don't know if I have said this but I find myself not caring so much how Tony goes in school. The thing is I don't want my wife to succeed with her methods. Since Tony went to school, family life has taken a dismal turn. I had it so much better when I was growing up. Sundays, I could go out or my father would take us for drives. In China, he would be considered a bad man because he wasn't making his children spend their Sundays doing homework.

• Bring back the Sabbath. Sunday shopping marked the real decline of civilization in the West.

• I went to the Sunao Shuofeng Airport for the first time since I flew to Yunnan province in 2004. The place was not at all as I remembered it. I recall that 12 years ago, the place had only one level. This time the airport had a departure and arrival levels. And it now looked like the Nanjing main train station with its crescent drive in and out before the entrances. I went to the airport, not to catch a flight, but to be the token foreigner in a video to be shown to passengers landing to Wuxi on international flights. I was filmed talking to a policewoman. Not having any lines to say, I chatted with the woman and ignored the big camera crew filming us.

• Really annoyed this van driver, I did... But only because he annoyed me first. It was just after I had dropped off Tony*. There is an intersection, where I can turn right, go straight, or turn left to get home. When I first came to this intersection a few years ago, I tried turning right but eventually found it annoying and decided to instead turn left because there were less delays even though I did have to drive further. Turning right, I would have to wait four or five lights before I could turn, all the while having to contend with drivers trying to either cut in line from the left turn lane to trying to get around the line by driving in the bicycle lane and even trying to cut in line from the right. I remember one time, pounding on the window of a vehicle and giving its driver a middle finger salute when he got too close to my car when trying to cut in ahead of me. Anyway. Back to the latest incident: I was in the left turn lane and was in front of the line. When the light is red, I can't enter the intersection, but when the light is green and the left turn light is red, I can enter the intersection part ways: there is a path is marked with lines. There was a van behind me. I didn't pay notice it until it honked its horn. And I saw that the van wanted me to move ahead so it could cut into the lane next to me. I decided to not move ahead and stop the guy from cheating. This annoyed the driver to no end and he gave me quite a sour look when he was finally able to get around me. I gave him the finger in response to his glare. It gives me no end of pleasure to annoy jerks like that. And why do they seem to take umbrage at being caught out? That's China for you.

• Stefan Molyneux kicked off of YouTube. Being in China, I am not impacted by this. I was always listening to him via podcast. These live-streaming shows don't do me any good with my being on the wrong side of the world and in the wrong time zones. Although I wonder if I would listen to them if the times were better for me. Which makes me wonder about the people who consume him on Youtube. Pretty lazy if you ask me. You can easily get all these YouTube-banned dissidents on other platforms. The thing about him being kicked off is that he was pretty milquetoast, and tried very hard to stay away from landmines that the Lefties get off on. [Getting kicked off Youtube is not becoming a badge of honor in these idiotic times.]

• Attendance at my Speakers Corners is increasing somewhat. I mean, I have gone from having none or one attendee to four or five. What I can report about the audience is that I am getting these old-timers coming to attend. Their listening isn't very good, but they are keen and have more interesting things to say than the younger attendees. One woman told me she was a member of the Communist Party but hated attended meetings because real discussion wasn't allowed. An older man told me that he tried to join the party but figured his application was rejected because he said he was too frank in his opinionating. He also told me that he was able to access news about Hong Kong that most people in the PRC couldn't access. I have taken in what they said without agreeing with them. To the woman, I talked about how many see the Democrats and Republicans in the US as being real a uniparty. I wonder too if these people are for real. That they seem too willing to talk about not liking the CCP. I wonder if they are trying to entrap foreigners.

*Hmmm. Seems something always happens after I drop Tony off at school.