Gratitude:
I am thankful for
vacations even if I can't get afford to get out of town on them.
Acknowledgement:
My vacations are boring. My
life is boring. I am boring. [However, I am not bored. Better to
be boring than bored.]
Request(s):
I hope someone can tell
me the one place I would want to see in Hong Kong. The K family will
be going there in early February. I want to see something with a
Bruce Lee or Historical theme.
What
is Akicistan? It isn't a
place. It is a state of mind that places cutting-edge
state-of-the-art sticks in mud. The word Akicistan is formed from
the initials AKIC
and the root stan.
If
Akicistan was an empire, it would comprise China, Canada, the Red
States of the USA, Latvia, and the parts of the world that comprise
Modern Christendom as well as ancient Christendom.
Akicistan
news in brief:
- New Year's in Akicistan was uneventful. Andis didn't do anything on New Year's Eve.
- Andis began a two week vacation. Andis won't be busy for most of January and the first half of February because he will be taking the three weeks vacation he has coming to him and he will also have a one week long holiday for the Spring Festival.
- Andis was able to watch some NFL playoff games live for the first time in ten years.
- Andis didn't publish a Dispatches from Akicistan for two weeks.
Important
Akicistan Links:
In
Akicistan:
Some
of us can speak Chinese!
新年快乐！元旦快乐！Andis
不可以说的中文。
Tony和Jenny
可以的。
We
sometimes pay attention to China. The
smog is so bad. I heard that it was forty times above the lowest
danger level in Harbin and twenty-five times in Shanghai! I also
read in the Duff and Nonsense blog that Xi Jing Ping wants to
rehabilitate Chairman Mao. I don't see how he could do it without
killing the golden goose
We
are fond of Canada!
However when I hear
about the cold spell in Manitoba where temperatures and wind chills
are so horrendous that you would die if you were exposed outside for
more than five minutes, I am happy to be in Wuxi, even it is
polluted.
We
are fond of Latvia! The idea
of Latvia adopting the Euro Currency which they did on January
1, 2014, doesn't thrill me. Listening to a Vatican Radio report
about it, I was pleased to hear that a sizable majority of Latvians
weren't thrilled about it earlier. It seems like getting a berth on
the Titanic after it hit the Iceberg.
The
Politics are Conservative and Reactionary!
Three more years of the Obama presidency! Uggh! I also think the
world is getting gayer.
English
is taught! I've been working
my way through a old-time English
grammar I downloaded from the Internet. It is informative, though in
some ways obsolete, about the spoken English language. For example,
the grammar says that the auxiliaries shall
and will
are used in very specific and exclusive ways in the future tense
depending on whether the speakers is speaking about mere futurity or
is expressing determination, command, or promise. Now, we just use
will,
to be doing,
or going to be doing
with out much regard to what sense the speaker intends to tell us
about the future.
Citizens
aren't freaks! According to
the recent Akicistan census, the population hasn't increased one
iota. The number of freaks remains at nought. No immigrants! No
Freaks! That is the Akicistan motto!
Reading
is the #1 Pastime! Here
is what I had been working my way through the past week or so:
Don
Colacho's (Nicolas Gomez Davilla) Aphorisms. There are
2,988 of them in this book that I compiled for myself. I try to
read at least one aphorism a day. I cut and paste the better
ones -- they are all profound actually -- and I put them in the AKIC
Weekly. (See below)
The
Niomachean Ethics of Aristotle.
After this, I will read Aquinas's Summa.
Ulysses
by James Joyce. I am following along with Frank
Delaney as he slowly guides podcast listeners through
Joyce's hard-to-read novel. Delaney figures he will have the
whole novel covered in about 22 years. Delaney completed
episode #186 recently and is working his way through the chapter that
introduces Leopold Bloom. I am getting ahead of Delaney as far as
reading the book. I will be finished my reading of it, I
figure, in a year. I read the novel despite its many blasphemies.
It is best to be aware of this stuff because the world is full of it,
and the world will always find a way of slapping you in the face with
it
The
Holy Bible (RSV-C2E version, aka the Ignatius Bible, and
Douay-Rheims version). I will read the two versions in
conjunction. Last week, I was reading the Book of Genesis.
Reclaiming
History：The
Assassination of John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi. Finished.
This was a long book. I had no plan to read it in its entirety, but
I read most of it. The biography of LHO was particularly
interesting. I didn't bother with Bugliosi's refutations of the more
popular conspiracy theories.
Canada
under British Rule 1760-1900 by Sir John George Bourinot. I
feel a need to bone up on Canadian history.
The
Rise of Modern China by Immanuel CY Hsu. David
Warren recommended this history of China which pegs Modern China
beginning with the fall of the Ming Dynasty.
The
U.S. Civil War by John Keegan. Dan
Carlin, the host of Hardcore History, has expressed a disliking of
Keegan so I am now wont to think that Keegan has many merits.
Carlin's idea about U.S. Healthcare was to have a bunch of experts
get into a room and design a system. Anyway, the book is good so
far.
Memorable
quotes are presented and discussed!
Nicholas
Gomez Davilla:
652
A man is wise not so much because he says the truth but because
he (who) knows the exact scope of what he says. Because he does not
believe he is saying anything more than what he is saying.
653
Whoever acquires experience in politics trusts only in the
classic maxim: do not do today what you can leave for
tomorrow. [RINO's think the maxim is good politics, even if they
have power.]
657
The new catechists profess that the Progress is the modern
incarnation of hope. But progress is not hope emerging, but the
dying echo of hope already vanished.
659
Liberty lasts only so long as the state functions amid the
indifference of its citizens. Despotism threatens when the citizens
agitates for or against his government.
663
A man is intelligent only if he is not afraid to agree with
fools.
664
Nobody finds himself by searching merely for himself.
Personality is born out of conflict with a norm. [What does
Davilla mean by personality?]
665
Everybody feels superior to what he does, because he believes he
is superior to what he is. Nobody believes he is the little that he
really is. [This aphorism always leaves me suitably chastened.
Is being an ESL teacher the best I can aspire, or am I not even
capable of that?]
676
In finding out what an
intelligent man said, it is customary only to listen to the fool who
mimics him. [Even I really cared
what Progressive Leftists thought, I would read the New York Times.
I don't bother talking politics with the ones I know.]
David
Warren:
The
honest observer must acknowledge that it is not happiness that awaits
this emancipated woman. Already I see them warehoused in the nursing
homes, waiting for their end, unvisited except by professional
minders, and utterly alone. Nor was it happiness in that morning, I
am told, when each ageing woman found in the mirror, that the dance
of youth had moved on and passed her by. [I
have often thought that if I went back to Canada, I would like to
volunteer at the care home where my father lived for a month before
he died.]
Even
if we were not looking, we saw something in passing, and it haunts us
still. Perhaps it was a vision of old age, in a season when long past
memories were rekindled, and people were remembered who are no longer
here. For that memento mori becomes a part of the “twelve days of
Christmas,” as the years pile on. And with the summoning of memory
comes the summoning of sorrows, especially sorrow in irretrievable
events. (A woman weeping outside the nursing home, six months ago:
“How many stupid last words I said, when all I wanted to say was,
‘I love you’.”)
But
for the present the experience of “density” is enough. Something
has passed by that we did not act upon. Something happened that we
did not prevent. Something didn’t happen we had the power to make
happen. Somehow, we missed it, when we had our chance. I would call
this a form of “survivor’s guilt,” that exists within us at the
metaphysical level, though confirmed in events, day after day.
To
put this most plainly: we have seen good and evil, and not chosen the
good; we have seen beauty and ugliness, and not chosen the beautiful;
we have seen true and false, and not chosen the truth. We have chosen
instead, with a grieving resignation, to “get on with it”; to
play it safe; to avoid any kind of overreaction. Or as Christ put it,
with spectacular poetry: we have taken our places with the dead, and
are the dead, burying their dead.
[I feel something like survivor's guilt when I think about my father
dying. I should have told him I loved him. I should have been like
Jenny who pleaded with him not to die.]
Robert
Royal
In
his novel Sybil, nineteenth-century British Prime Minster
Benjamin Disraeli described a character as “distinguished for
ignorance” because he “had only one idea and that idea was
wrong.” The idea – promoted for decades by high-minded
social engineers – that a national healthcare law would benefit all
Americans qualifies for the 2013 Disraeli Award.
A
liberal commentator on an David Warren article in the Catholic Thing:
I’d
love to see someone say government budgets are moral documents and
Paul Ryan's budget is obscene. [Pure
poppycock. Personal budgets could be moral documents. Government
budgets are impersonal and abstract documents. To think they could
be moral is obscene. Everyone has to deal with the faces of the poor
they do actually see. When a politician like Obama sees a poor face
he is like Che Guevara, in a legend, entering a religious place full
of poor people, getting angry at their fate, and then moving on to
government to try and fix the problem he saw. While Che leaves in
glory, like Obama taking a vacation in Hawaii, the hated Catholic
nuns are left to deal with the poor. To deal with the poor, one has
to abandon the calculus of central planning and government budgeting.
We have to help the poor ourselves. Government budgets are tools
for moral posturing, nothing more. And plus what the commentator
said violated the Catholic Church's principle of Subsidiarity.]
Cardinal
Newman:
.
. .The one peculiar and characteristic sin of the world is this, that
whereas God would have us live for the life to come, the world would
make us live for this life. . . .not for the next. It takes, as the
main scope of human exertion, an end which God forbids; and
consequently all that it does becomes evil, because directed to a
wrong end. . . .
Kathy
Shaidle (in a year in review article)
This
is the part where a normal person would nominate their favourite
movie of 2013. Except the best movie I saw this year came out in
1953. [99 River Street which I
was inspired to watch.]
Somehow, millions of
supposedly intelligent viewers bought into Breaking Bad, a show
about the only public-school teacher in the Western world who
didn’t have health insurance. [Breaking
Bad was quality television. Tony thinks it is like Mister Bean.]
Lists
are made:
AKIC's
Most Memorable Moments of 2013:
- Read two books by Theodore Dalrymple.
- Wuxi Peach Maoists had a 2-11-1 record in Andis's Fantasy Football League.
- Andis got an Ipad Mini.
- Tony graduated from Kindergarten.
- Tony and Andis had a train day in Shanghai.
- Andis got a demotion at work.
- Andis didn't bother talking to his co-workers at work for nine months. Ended the year by discovering it was a wise decision.
- Andis split up the AKIC weekly into two parts. One part was a diary. The second part was a weekly magazine.
- Andis decided to label himself a reactionary.
- Andis was able to order Crown Royal on Taobao.
- Andis may have been called a cunt by another English teacher. Andis didn't respond.
- The Hui Shan Wanda Plaza opened near Casa Kaulins. So there was now a McDonald's within walking distance, as well as a Starbucks.
- Andis discovered that eight or nine foreigners teach at a High School in his area. He never did meet them.
- Andis decided to become more overtly Christian in his blog.
- David Warren's blog became Andis's most visited page.
- Andis never did find a satisfactory replacement for the Google Reader.
- Andis noted the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination.
- Andis renewed with his school for the tenth year.
- Andis stopped writing articles for his Wuxi China Expatdom blog. He didn't have the time.
- Tony started primary school.
- Andis saw the Wuxi City Hall and was taken by it gigantic-ism.
- The Hen Long and Suning Plazas opened up in downtown Wuxi within weeks of each other. Andis spent the end of the year asking if it was necessary.
- Andis stopped making entries to his Wuxi China Expatdom blog.
- Andis started a blog called Views of China from Casa Kaulins.
Predictions
for 2014:
- Queen Elizabeth II will pass away.
- The Wuxi subway will have problems.
- There will be more smog problems in Wuxi.
- The Maple Leafs won't win the Stanley Cup.
- The Republicans will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the 2014 mid-term elections.
- Rob Ford will remain the mayor of Toronto.
- Winnipeg won't win the Grey Cup or the Stanley Cup.
- I will continue to be indecisive.
Thoughts
are thought
- Why is that Progressive Left Wing Liberal types like to say that they are on the side of science? They can't say they are on the side of Socialism anymore because it had been proven over and over again to have failed. They need to hold onto something that has been successful.
- Socialism isn't scientific. The system that it assails: free market capitalism in fact is. Capitalism conducts experiments. The hypotheses are that there is a need for some product or service. If the experiment show the hypotheses is wrong, the hypotheses is quickly abandoned. Governments have a having of ignoring the results of their experiments and acting like their hypotheses are true regardless of experiments showing they aren't.
- Tolerance does not mean approval. I would think that tolerate means putting up with things you don't like.
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