Numb; Tony and the Dorm Incident; People Who Don't Understand; I am an anti-anti-racist; tiger-mothers; Mad Jenny; Stranded Because of Lockdown

Hearing the news that I do hear, I feel numb.  It is so bad that paradoxically I feel no need to be upset.  I have a sense of humor and God to get me through it.

I haven't bothered to question Tony about his dorm incident that I mentioned in a previous blog entry.  He seemed rather somber when I was finally able to see him in person. 

A doctor who attends my Speakers Corners said she didn't understand my vaccine--smaccine reaction to covid vaccines.  People who say that when not understanding the arguments of others, should surely do more to try to understand the premises upon which people come to their opinions.   I can understand why she would think they are necessary.

I am an anti-anti-racist (an AAR) because anti-racists are making the thing, they say they are against, worst.

When a table of tiger mothers gets together, police should come and break up the gathering.  For when tiger mothers get together, they try to think of ways to be crueler to their children.  These gatherings are super-spreaders of unreason and unaccountabilty.

My wife Jenny is mad because my son Tony responded to her violent outbursts in kind.  But to her way of thinking it is all my fault.  She hits her boys with impunity, but how dare they ever hit back.

During a Speaker's Corner,  I was told of citizens arriving at train stations at the end of their journey, only to be put in quarantine for two weeks.  My first reaction was to ask why they weren't prevented from going, at the start of their journey.  Different jurisdictions have different rules they told me.  I was then told of students who were stranded between cities on the freeways because of lock-downs.  One driver left Wuxi to go to Shanghai.  When he went to Shanghai, he was told that he couldn't enter the city because it was lock-downed.  Returning to Wuxi, he was told the Wuxi was now locked down and he couldn't enter Wuxi.  He had to stay at a Freeway Service Area.

Unseasonably Warm in Wuxi; Vaccine Smaccine; Incident at Tony's Dorm; Start Afresh?!? How About Apologizing?; We Can't All Be Winners

17 degrees Celsisus in January.  Who'd a thunk it?

At my Speaker's Corner, one of my students talked about a Chinese Covid Vaccine being said to be getting huge acceptance because the American one(s) were so bad.  I avoided the question of whether anything Chinese could be other than crap, by basically telling the student "vaccine, smaccine!"  I don't see the point of a covid-vaccine.  The student then tried to advance her belief that covid vaccines were necessary by saying that German leader Angela Merkel supported it....  And then one of the students agreed with me.

Incident at my son Tony's dorm at his school.  I don't know the full story.  What I heard was that Tony got into a swearing match with a group of Grade 8 students.  Five of them then later went to his dorm room to confront him.  Tony got really angry at them and brought his baseball bat to threaten them.  All I have heard from Tony was from an email in which he said he didn't want to talk about it.  My wife Jenny says the friction is coming from his not being Chinese, but a lone foreigner in his group at school.  I thought about my times in middle school and how I was ostracized as well...

Pretender Biden wants to start afresh.  How about apologizing, you thief!  How about telling white liberals to be honest?  How about telling white liberals to be asking Trump supporters for forgiveness?  So far as President, Biden is being the icehole that I always imagined that he would be.

If both teams, before a match, read the greatest self-help book ever written, it wouldn't stop one of the teams from losing.

How to Act During the Bidenreich; Trying to Help Tony; Assessing Trump

How should I act online during the Bidenreich?  Should I mock Senility, Creepy, China, Rutabaga Joe the Pretender, Pedophile, Thief, Fraud in Chief mercilessly?  Or should I ignore all that is going on, say nothing, enjoy the ensuing disaster and try to become a real Catholic?

I try to help Tony do his homework but he doesn't want my help.  I was sitting beside him in his bedroom/study and he asked if I could do something else instead of sitting by him and doing nothing.

Was Trump a great president?  He was better than Obama, Bush II, Clinton and Bush I, but that's not saying much; he was still a disappointment.  In a sane world -- a world without anti-Trumpers, Shitlibs and Never Trumpers -- I wouldn't have been so rabid in my support for him.  But the truth is, he was and still is the best current option for the USA.  Everything else on the menu is a shit sandwich.  If you want to get valid criticism of Trump, you have to consult the people who made intelligent cases for supporting him and were disappointed by him; not those idiots who were convinced that he was Hitler and a virulent racist.

Crossing Guard

These days, I have seen so many crossing guards at intersections.  Some of them are police officers, some of them seem to be security types.  Others seem to be "volunteers" or people "recruited" to stand at the corner, and advise pedestrians and cyclists to behave themselves.  These volunteers wear shiny vests and hold a yellow flag.  They are from many age groups.

One guard, happened to catch my attention as I was taking the bus to work. He looked to be past middle age.  He was standing solidly in place, but other than that he looked feeble.  He held his flag with a determination that seemed trained into him, but it was fragile all the same.  His appearance caught more than a passing glance from me because of his failed attempt to stop a female cyclist from running a red light.  The cyclist ignored him, he tried to get her attention, and he then shrugged and stayed in place like an ignored and powerless sentry.  

I thought how he was but an ornament.  I wondered if there was any more useful thing he could be doing, or was this the way of China where they still massively employ people as doormen.

"Covid" Coming Back to China?

The government is advising the locals to not hold big gatherings.  Gatherings above ten, I have heard.

If I leave the Wuxi area, I would have to have a Covid Test done.  One of my colleagues had to do this because he went to Anhui.  (I haven't left the Wuxi area since February 2020.)

The government caused my school's Spring Festival dinner to be downgraded from a dinner at a banquet hall to an afternoon tea party.

The Kaulins Family China won't be going to my wife Jenny's hometown for Spring Festival this year.  We will be staying in Wuxi.  The covid panic has made it impractical.  (I hope all other families still leave our apartment complex, so we can have silence and quiet.)

As the Trump administration comes to a close, and the Left goes full nazi censorship,  the only people I can talk to are in Canada and America and Australia.  No point in talking in local laowei.  I suspect I am the only Trump sympathetic laowai in Wuxi.  (If there are others.  Please email me:  andiskaulins@protonmail.com)

Annoyance at the Wuxi Metro Store, Bastard Food Delivery Drivers

Metro in Wuxi is not to be mixed up with the Wuxi Metro Subway System.  The Metro I am going to refer to in this blog entry is the Costco type wholesale retail store that operates all over China. 

My latest trip to Metro was ruined by their introducing the self checkout stands to their stores.  They seemed to think that they could drastically curtail the number of human checkouts they could use.  The end result were huge lineups, that you would never see on a Monday, at the two human checkouts.  I got tempted into using the self checkouts to avoid the long lineups, but I wasted fifteen minutes to find out that I couldn't use the self-checkout because the app you needed to use the self-checkout wouldn't accept my Alipay because it wasn't only set to use a credit card and not a debit card.  Kapeche?  Understand?

I was annoyed but in a restrained way, for me.

These food delivery e-bike drivers, whose numbers have drastically increased because of an app that can be used to get home food deliveries, must get sworn at a lot during their shifts because they drive like bastards.  Either that, or they occasionally get sworn at by this foreigner, who has sworn at them on numerous occasions.  One of these iceholes just recently got sworn at because he made too tight a turn to get around me.

It Wasn't Trump's Fault; Trump Wasn't the Bad Guy in What Happened on January 6th! The Left and the Rinos Were!

The many people who are condemning what happened on January 6th and then blaming Trump for it, seem to have forgotten all the b.s. that has come from the left and the progressives and the feckless rino cuckservatives.  Have they forgotten the storming of the Wisconsin Legislature, the storming of the Cavanaugh Confirmation Hearings, the silly impeachment attempt, the Russian collusion nonsense, the big tech censorship, cancel culture, cucks acting like timid battered housewives, the burn loot murder and antifa riots over oogily-boogily racism; the slurring of the white middle class, the continuing attempts to destroy the classics of Western Civilisation, the stupid lock-downs, the hypocrisy of those advocating for lock-downs, the calling of non-leftist gatherings as super spreader events? I could go on....

Everything the Democrats and Globalists and deep-staters have done the past four years, and even before that, lead to what happened on January sixth in D.C.  To try to place the blame for it on Trump is a lie.  If they want to stop the discontent, they are going to have to get to the truth of the matter.  From what I have seen so far, hardly anyone, who thinks of himself as respectable and mainstream, is interested in the truth, but only in puking out short-sighted and ignorant bromides.

The Movies, TV Series, Documentaries and Other Video that AKIC watched in 2020

Here is a list of the Movies, TV Series, Documentaries and other video, rated on a five-star scale, that I watched in 2020:

High Society (1956) *****

The Young Lions (1958) **** 

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) *****

Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer (2020) *****

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) *****

Apocalypto (2006) **** 

The Philadelphia Story (1940) *****

The Witcher (Season 1) **** 

Now, Voyager (1942) *****

The Lavendar Hill Mob (1951) *****

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) *****

Joy Division Documentary (2007) *****

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) *****

Why Beauty Matters by Roger Scruton (2009) *****

Stagecoach (1939) *****

The Strawberry Blonde (1941) *****

Sahara (1943) **** 

Gaslight (1944) *****

The Lost Weekend (1945) *****

The Killers (1946) *****

Brute Force (1947) *****

Key Largo (1948) *****

White Heat (1949) **** 

Sunset Boulevard (1950) *****

Detective Story (1951) ***** 

Bend of the River (1952) **** 

The Wild One (1953) **** 

Narco Mexico (Season 2) *****

Grizzly Man (2005) *****

The Rise and Fall of Pablo Escobar (2018) *****

This World: Three Days of Terror: the Charlie Hebedo Massacre *****

Viva Zapata! (1952) **** 

2020 Las Vegas Nevada Democratic Debate *** 

Shane (1953) *****

Gimme Shelter (1970) **** 

Three Days of the Condor (1975) **** 

The King of Communism (Nicolae Ceausescu) **** 

Malcolm X Documentary (1972) *****

Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 10) **** 

Tiger King (2020) *****

Scarface (1983) *****

Evil Genius (Netflix Documentary Series) *****

ZZ Top That Little Ol' Band From Texas (2019) **** 

Evil Lives Here (Season 1) *****

The Seventh Seal (1957) *****

Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer (2020) **** 

Making of a Murderer (Season 1) *****

The Passion of the Christ (2004) *****

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019) **** 

In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) *** 

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) *****

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) *****

The Act of Killing (2012) *****

The Hustler (1961) *****

The Last Waltz (1978) **** 

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) *****

Manhattan (1979) ****

Bosch (Season 6) *****

Schitt's Creek (Season 6) *** 

Extraction (2020) ****

Devs (Season 1) ****

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) *** 

Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Burn(2020) *****

Patton Documentary (narrated by Ronald Reagan) *****

Caliphate (Season 1) ****

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) ****

Runaway Train (1985) *****

The Last Dance *****

Hoaxed (2019) *** 

The Spanish Civil War (1983 BBC Documentary) *****

The Bureau (French Show) S01 ****

Rick and Morty (Season 4) *****

Fauda (Season 1) *** 

Training Day (2001) *** 

LA 92 (2017) *****

Mr. Jones (2019) *** 

Seconds from Disaster: 9/11 ****

Long Gone Summer (2020) *****

Berkeley in the Sixties (1990) *****

The 13th Warrior (1999) ****

Dennis Rodman's Big Bang in Pyongyang (2015) *****

The Man Standing Next (2020) *****

Prisoners (2013) *****

Trotsky Biography (2017) ****

Above the Best (2019) ****

Tourist Trap (1979) ****

The Missouri Breaks (1976) ****

Midnight Express (1978) ****

Tread (2020) *****

The Search for Ulysses (1966) *****

Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography (1992) ****

Out of the Past (1947) *****

Chris Distefano Size 38 Waist (2019) ** 

Desire (1936) *****

The French Connection (1971) *****

Miller's Crossing (1990) *****

Days of Heaven (1978) *** 

Z (1969) ****

Haywire (2011) ****

Africa Addio (1966) *****

America Under Siege – Antifa ****

Shanghai Express (1932) *****

The Painted Veil (1934) *****

1972 Canada Russia Series Game 8 *****

Des (2020) *****

Ted Lasso (Gave up after 7 episodes) **

Union Pacific (1939) ****

Challenger: The Final Flight *****

Planet of the Humans (2020) ****

Fight Club (1999) *****

Robocop (1987) ****

Withnail and I (1987) *****

The Secret Garden (1993) *****

The Merchant of Venice with Laurence Olivier (1973) *****

King Lear with Paul Scofield (1971) *****

The Putin Interviews with Oliver Stone (2017) *****

Dead Man's Shoes (2004) ****

Black Narcissus (1947) *****

Stray Dog (1949) (Akira Kurosawa) *****

The Red Shoes (1948) *****

Harakiri (1962) *****

The Loved One (1965) ****

Escape from New York (1981) ****

How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) ****

Ikiru (1952) *****

The Abdominable Dr. Phibes (1971) *****

Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972) *****

Theatre of Blood (1973) *****

Throne of Blood (1957) *****

Madhouse (1974) ****

Hamlet (1948) *****

Charade (1963) *****

Henry V (1944) *****

Richard III (1955) *****

It's Love I'm After (1937) *****

Of Human Bondage (1934) ****

The Petrified Forest (1936) *****

The Miracle at Morgan's Creek (1944) *****

The Great McGinty (1940) *****

A Very Murray Christmas (2015) *****

Holiday Inn (1942) *****

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) *****

Some Biden Moments; D.C. January 6th; Stuck in the City;

Where are the bathrooms in Wuxi Metro stations?  Sometimes, you have to enter through the admission gate to get to them; sometimes, they are outside the admission gates. (One of the stations, the bathroom was actually on the platform, but that was another story.)  Recently, I went through the admission gate, only to realize that the bathroom was outside the gate and that I would have to exit the platform-slash-admitted area to get to them.  I had a Biden moment.  This cost me a bit of money on my transit card and also required me to again go through the security area where the staff recognized me from an instant before.  One of them thought that I was a stupid laowai who didn't know that I had to go upstairs to get to the subway platform, and so made these go-upstairs-you-dummy! gestures.  I tried to say the words for bathroom in Chinese, but they didn't understand me and so I had no choice but go up to the subway platform knowing the truth of the matter, which was that I had made a mistake that was understandable but not stupid ....

Then another day, I had trouble trying to top up my transit card.  The booth I normally went to, to get my card topped off, was lacking a staff person.  So I went to another booth trying to top off my card.  I was holding cash along with my transit card so the staff could see what I wanted.  The staff member who tried to help me unfortunately confused me as to where I should go, and so I went back and forth three times before I was finally able to find a staff member who could actually top up my card.

I told the attendees of my Speaker's Corners that something might go down on the January 6th in Washington, D.C.; and indeed it did.  So much happening, it is hard to have coherent thoughts.

I haven't left Wuxi since the Spring Festival.  If I do, I would have to get a Covid test, I have learned.

2021 Off to a Bad Start; No Hash Browns at McDonalds; Are Shopping Bags Thinner?; Wuxi: a Barbarian City?; Will Something Happen on January 6th in D.C.?; Stuck in China; Well-Read and Well-Watched?; Eleven, Potato and Nine

2021 at home was okay to start.  But when I went out for the first time on January 2nd, the world seemed to have only gotten more annoying.  I saw more security guards everywhere in Wuxi, whether on the street corners or in the Metro stations.  When I went shopping at the Supermarket, the plastic bag I had to buy was made of thinner material.  afterward, I didn't feel comfortable carrying the groceries I bought home without having my hand on the bottom of the bag.  At McDonald's, where I had come to really like their breakfasts and had then come to have a ritual of buying my son hash browns on a Sunday morning, I was very annoyed to see that I could not buy hash browns there on the first Sunday of 2021.  As far as I could determine from the staff, this removal of hash browns of the menu was a permanent thing initiated at the start of 2021 and not a temporary supply chain issue.  Unless, of course it was a more long-term supply chain issue...  I wondered what other bureaucratic changes whether from government or corporations were on offer for 2021.

I learned from a few students that Wuxi recently lost its civilized city status from the central government.  My first reaction was to ask if Wuxi was now a Barbarian city.  I also thought to myself (and now to rare readers) if this also meant that in Wuxi, men could adopt a cave man attitude about women, and just grab a girl that took their fancy by the hair and take her back to his cave.   Another student told me that the status had been lost because an official doing the inspection of Wuxi was attacked by a stray dog.  Local officials beating the dog to death were to no avail, and the civilized status of their jurisdiction was lost.

I have seen groups of stray dogs wandering the city.  I have heard many jokes about these dogs eventually being captured for food.  I have never feared being attacked by these dogs.  I suppose these dogs can sense that I am not a bureaucrat and not worth the bother.

I have read and heard that something may go down in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, and I have also come across speculation that maybe nothing much will go down on January 6th other than people standing around hoping for something to happen.  What do I hope will happen?  A restoration of the Republic with Trump as president, brought about by a nice short civil war where shitlibs get their ass kicked and maybe get their brains adjusted.

I happened to read an email from the Canadian Consulate in Shanghai.  It stated that if I went back to Canada in the next little while, I would be subject, on the penalty of law, to a two-week quarantine.  What this essentially means, is that I can't plan my biennial trip to Canada which, in a sane world, would be happening this year.  What would be three weeks would have to be seven weeks, because I would be quarantined at both ends of a trip.

Silly thought:  If you read a wide and extensive range of literature, you are said to be well-read.  If you watch a wide and extensive range of TV series and Cinema, are you said to be well-watched?

Here are some riddles.  Who am I talking about? 

If Nine meets Potato, Potato better not dress up as a little girl.  (But Potato may not have to dress up.  Being half the age of Nine, Potato may look like a little girl to Nine already.)

If Nine meets Eleven, will Eleven pay him in cash or by mobile phone?

So, who are nine, eleven, and potato?

Note:  I will be publishing these entries in both my blogger and wordpress blog sites.  It seems that my blogger site has been labelled dangerous.

Stay or Not Go; 1989, 1966; Mishima: A Story in Four Chapters; Tony's Christmas Break;

I told students that I was either going to stay at home or not go out for New Year's Eve.

I asked students if there had been years, in their lives, that were bad as 2020.  One said 1989 and that his father told him that some university students were killed... I mumbled in response.  An older student said 1966 because it was the start of the Cultural Revolution...

Taking the bus home from work, I could see that there had been a traffic accident ahead because there was a bottleneck that the vehicles were trying to get around.  It was a collision between a car and an e-bike.  Passing the scene, I first saw a young child standing on the road, I then saw an adult lying on the ground.  One of the other passengers gasped.

I was listening to these two podcasts about the film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters that I had just watched.  I found the film to be interesting.  The first podcast, I listened to, said the film was astonishing.  It mentioned some aspects of the film that I liked, like how the film made you think about how to be in life.  The second podcast said the Mishima was a fascist and thus a bad person whose art could not possibly have any redeeming qualities.  I don't think that the second podcaster could define fascism accurately, other than to say it was a bad thing.  I realized that that I was encountering the mind of progressive liberalism speaking aloud and that it really was sad stuff full of the prejudice that this mindset thinks itself to be against.  It was the logic of cancel culture.  Bad people, or rather people who they think are bad, make bad art.  Their art must be cancelled and ignored.

Tony frittered away his Christmas Break.  That is all I can say.  He has this annoying to behold habit of playing on the computer while watching a video on his phone.