November 875,1161 December 825,1146. The making of a peasant doctor. Chesterton and Common Sense.

Close but no cigar. November 2008 is the best month this blog has ever had for numbers. December fell 50 visitors and 15 page views short of reaching that milestone. I hope I can get a thousand visitors in January.

I am spending my first afternoon of 2009 at home with my son Tony. Jenny has gone downtown to do some shopping. Tony has slept all the afternoon which was fine for me since it allowed me to do some reading.

The first three chapters of the Maoist novel I found in Nanchang Market defy belief. They chronicle the cultural revolution as the most unsympathetic of accounts portrayed the event. The novel treats Mao like a god. The novel has its' protagonist denounce the antagonist at a mass meeting. The hero then makes a big character poster to denounce another baddie. The designation of people by class is remarked upon and not seen as being at all inhuman and cruel.

Tony, at this point in the novel, cried to be held which I did. Two attempts to put him back down resulted in high-pitched piercing screams so I held him in my arms for an hour. This did not stopping me from surfing the Internet where I read this article about common sense and G.K. Chesterton. (Thanks to seablogger for drawing me to that site.) This quote can tell us how we can get out of the recession pronto:

...And one of the main problems with our practice is that we don't do
anything ourselves. We don't take responsibility. We leave it to the expert or
to the public servant or to the private servant. We don't grow our own food; we
don't build our own homes. We don't teach our own children; we don't even raise
our own children. We leave everything up to someone else. We don't even think
for ourselves. We even let others tell us what our tastes are. And, we don't
even practice our own religion. It has become more convenient to leave that to
others, too.

Should I change Tony's diaper while he is asleep? That is the question.