Gratitude:
I am thankful that my vacation
did not depress me as much as I thought it would.
Acknowledgement:
I have wasted great portions
of my life. I could write a book about it called Chronicles of
Wasted Time except it has already been done and the author at least
was successful enough in an earthly sense to have been able to have
the autobiography published. I, on the other hand, am a null, a
non-entity but I going to have to get myself to get use to the
moments of wincing about it that can't be helped.
Request(s):
There isn't anything I can ask
for these days.
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:
- Andis did nothing interesting in the first week of his vacation. He didn't go anywhere even in Wuxi.
- Andis decided that he will try to watch the first three seasons of Downton Abbey.
- Andis did one thing of not in the second week of his vacation. He took Tony to Shanghai for a day. Unfortunately, they got bored after half-a-day and had to spend three torturous hours waiting for the train that was to take them back to Wuxi.
- Andis worked nine days in a row at his school before having another two week vacation/holiday.
- Andis spend the first six days of the second vacation/holiday in Beixin with his wife's in-laws. He was bored silly.
- The second week of the second v/h would be spent in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Important
Akicistan Links:
In
Akicistan:
Some
of us can speak Chinese!
对！我的儿子可以说的中文。我的中文？你们问的。我的中文不好。很不好！很很不好！！
明白？
We
sometimes pay attention to China. Actually,
with all the time off, I didn't spend much time paying attention to
China.
We
are fond of Canada!
Listening to CJOB podcasts depresses about my prospects if I went
back to Canada. The city of Winnipeg, I heard, is incapable of
clearing snow. The medical system is sending patients, who are still
sick, home by taxi.
We
are fond of Latvia! On the
Internet, I read a Latvian
women cried when she heard the hateful comments made by New York
governor Andrew Cuomo. She was reminded of what it was like to live
in the Soviet Union.
The
Politics are Conservative and Reactionary!
Look at the quotes section below.
English
is taught! I haven't been
doing much English teaching in the start of 2014.
Citizens
aren't freaks! Akicistanis
keep to themselves.
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 #191 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 finished reading the Book of Genesis. I
am not in the Book of Exodus. In the New Testament, I am reading the
Gospel According to Matthew.
Canada
under British Rule 1760-1900 by Sir John George Bourinot. Finished.
I felt I needed to bone up on some Canadian history. This book was
informative. It was a little too optimistic about the results of the
British Crown's dealing with the native population.
The
Rise of Modern China by Immanuel CY Hsu. Finished
Part One. A good book. 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. Finished.
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. I
wondered about Carlin when he weighed in on the U.S. Healthcare
debate. All Carlin wanted was to have a bunch of experts get into a
room and design a system – self-evident nonsense to anyone who
knows anything about economics and how bureaucracies work. Anyway,
someone who thinks like that clearly is full of it. Not to say that
Carlin's podcast isn't interesting – it is the best and most
professionally done history podcast there is.
Things
That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics by
Charles Krauthammer. Finished.
Krauthammer is a great pundit. He seems to be well-grounded and he
has a good idea what it is that lib-dems and progressives are
thinking.
Our
Culture, What's Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses by Theodore
Dalrymple. Finished. Another
great collection of essays by Dalrymple. I put him up with the
following writers whose latest pieces, when ever I can come across
them on the Internet, are must-reads for me: John Derbyshire, David
Warren, Thomas Sowell, Camille Paglia, Peter Hitchens, Victor David
Hansen, Steve Sailer, and Anne Coulter. In this collection of
essays, Dalrymple writes about legalizing drugs (he is against it.),
Africa (wonderful people there except when you give them government
positions.), and evil that takes advantage of the modern attitudes of
non-judgemental-ism and anti-limits.
Jeeves
and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks. Finished.
What Faulks attempted in this novel was very audacious: he sought
to add a novel to the Wodehouse oeuvre.
I think he pulled it off. The book is true to the spirit of the
original. More importantly, it doesn't conform to the vulgarity of
today.
Lord
of the World by Robert Hugh Benson. Finished.
The best novel I have read in years. It was written over a hundred
years ago. It was prophetic in the manner of 1984. I suppose that
because the novel is very Catholic, it is not well known which is too
bad because it should be. I can't help but think that the character
Julian
Felsenburgh, the novel's anti-Christ, bears a vague resemblance to
Barack Obama.
Ameritopia:
The Unmaking of America by Mark R. Levin. Finished.
Not a great book. Levin is on the side of the angels, but there
isn't much in this book that I hadn't known already.
Memorable
quotes are presented and discussed!
Nicholas
Gomez Davilla:
673
There is no need to expect anything from anyone, nor to disdain
anything from anyone.
678
All peace is bought with vile acts.
686
Nobody who knows himself can
absolve himself.
705
Doctrinaire individualism is dangerous not because it produces
individuals, but because it suppresses them. The product of the
doctrinaire individualism of the 19th century is the mass man of the
20th century.
709
Impartiality is the child of laziness and fear.
710
To be Christian, in accordance with the latest fashion, consists
less in repenting of our sins than in repenting of our Christianity.
712
A cultured man is someone for whom nothing lacks interest
and almost everything lacks importance.
722 Intentional, systematic
originality is mediocrity's contemporary uniform.
725 Politics is not the art
of imposing the best solutions, but of blocking the worst.
732 Modern psychology
renounced introspection, not so much to obtain results as to obtain
less disquieting results.
734 There are only instants.
[On my todo list, I have the following written for constant
referral: Focus on the present. For that is where your life really
is. And it consists only of tests.]
736 Primitive man transform
objects into subjects; modern man transforms subjects into objects.
We can suppose that the former deceives himself, but we know with
certainty that the latter is wrong. [What does this mean. This
one is so pregnant with meaning and insight.]
737 For two centuries the
people has borne the burden not only of those who exploit it, but
also of those who liberate it. Its back is buckling under the double
weight. [The people who fashion themselves to be the liberators
often think they can defy the laws of gravity: hence the buckling
and the doubling burden of taxes and bureaucracy with little to show
for it.]
739 In order to convince our
interlocutors, it is often necessary to invent contemptible,
deceitful, ridiculous arguments. Whoever respects his neighbor
fails as an apostle.[Can the English teaching fraternity in China
stand together? I am afraid not. There are perverts among us.]
744
To mature is to see increase the number of things about which it
seems grotesque to give an opinion, for or against.
David Warren:
There
is poison in every "charitable" act done under external
compulsion; poison for both the giver & receiver.
In
both my experience and observation of others, I have noticed this.
When an obstacle is created between oneself and God, an obstacle is
also necessarily created within oneself. And until that is removed –
or shifted, adjusted, or otherwise dealt with – one remains divided
against oneself.
One
embarks on a double life. And this can prove quite inconvenient to
someone with only one soul.
George
Jonas:
Like
Obama a few generations later, Pearson received the Nobel Peace Prize
for making the world a little more dangerous. Obama received his
prize in advance, while Pearson's came as a reward for facilitating
the efforts of a leading democracy (Eisenhower's) to save a military
dictatorship (Nasser's) from the consequences of aggression, by
forcing three allied democracies (Britain, France, and Israel) to
leave the job unfinished. It was a high price to pay for a moral
victory. And I suggest we are still paying for it today.
Charles
Krauthammer:
the
greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the
ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the
ultimate expression of the collective.
The
conscious deployment of a double standard directed at the Jewish
state and at no other state in the world, the willingness
systematically to condemn the Jewish state for things others are not
condemned for—this is not a higher standard. It is a discriminatory
standard. And discrimination against Jews has a name too. The word
for it is antisemitism. [So much
for poo-pooing the idea that opposition to the Jewish state is
somehow not anti-Semitism.]
Theodore
Dalrymple
He
would have felt it tactless to obtrude where he was not really
wanted; and (an almost inconceivable attitude today) he felt no
bitterness at not being wanted. [How
easy my life would have been if I had had that attitude. I will have
to try to be that way for the rest of my life however. There is
still a chance to redeem myself.]
The
choice for Gillray, as for all persons of good sense, was never
between perfection and hell on earth, but always between better and
worse. [Gillray was a political
caricaturist who lived at the time of Edmund Burke. Currently, it is
Conservatism that is the better and Progressivism that is the worse.]
Horace’s
famous line of two millennia ago comes to mind: they change their
skies, not their souls, who run across the sea.
Eric
Voegelin
“no
one needs to participate in the aberrations of his time.”
Sebastian,
Faulks from “Jeeves and the Wedding Bells.”
I’ve
never really understood why girls fall for chaps at all, to be quite
frank, but I suppose if a twenty-four-carat popsy like Pauline Stoker
can declare undying love for an ass like Chuffy Chufnell then all
things are possible. Women are, as my old housemaster had remarked,
queer cattle.
Lists
are made: Things I like about America
- Old Hollywood Movies
- Hollywood Musicals
- Frank Sinatra Records.
- Major League Baseball (before the wild card)
- Rush Limbaugh
- Right Wing Talk Radio
- American Generous
- Rock and Roll
- American Rules Football
- The National Football League
- It isn't Europe.
- It isn't China.
- They are Canada's neighbours.
- It isn't Mexico.
- Their pop culture
- McDonald's.
- Pizza Hut.
- Walmart.
- Denis Prager
- EWTN
- Seablogger
- American Fez
- Babe Ruth
- Joe Dimaggio
- James Stewart
- Westerns
- The NRA
- The U.S. Military
- Charles Krauthammer
- William F Buckley
- Pamela Anderson* (She is an American citizen now.)
- Mickey Mantle
- Roger Staubach
- Early Van Halen
- Wendy's
- Florence King
- Flannery O'Connor
- Mark Twain
- Ambrose Bierce
- Milt Rosenberg
- Westerns
- Cowboys
- Jazz
- Rock and Roll
- Country Music
Thoughts
are thought
- As the Western world becomes gayer and more dysfunctional, kids who have a mother and a father are going to be persecuted on playgrounds.
- I wish I could have been a butler, a chauffeur, or a monk. These are the professions that would have suited me. Alas, I live in the wrong age.
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