Big Whoop Dee Do!

So the Government here has lowered the amount of days for quarantine for international arrivals?  It really isn’t anything to be excited about.  The stupid policies are still in place.  

I had a zoom call with someone in Shanghai who was quarantined at home on account of having passed by or passed near a medium risk zone.

And people always have to wonder what the rules are if they travel anywhere in China.  

Do the progressives and normies make memes? And if they do, what are they? Pictures of Trump and working class people dressed as Nazis?

The commentators I read who said that the US mid-term elections were not worth getting excited about were right.  But they were something to be amused about. Fetterman being put in the Senate was the equivalent of the Romans putting a horse in the Senate.  Fetterman got votes because people were sorry for him.  Fetterman’s state also voted in a dead man who, like Fetterman, must have garnered a lot of sympathy votes.  Another state with a lot of voting technology, instead of tabulating votes quicker than before, seems to be harkening to a age and place where people could only get around by walking…

A:  You need a 100,000 RMB?

B:  Yes!

A:  Okay.  Put it on my tab.

A:  Do you prefer Cash on the Barrel or Corn on the Cob?

B:  Cash on the Barrel.

A:   Ah. Too bad.  I wanted to pay you in corn.

Popcorn chicken that has been left in the fridge overnight is so tasty.

Trump, said my favorite blogger David Warren, may go down as the last partially honest U.S. President.  The people who think Trump is Hitler incarnate would balk at this.  But they forget that bombast, that Trump has, is a natural personality trait that many possess and that intelligent people can deal with people with these traits because the motivations and thoughts of bombast are ultimately transparent.  The bureaucrats who despised Trump hated him because he was gauche enough to not act like the phony politicians they preferred to deal with and thought they could control.

Trump was a very consequential politician because he was the vehicle that exposed how bad the political and bureaucratic classes really are.  Never has a figure so changed the way people look at the order of the world.  One group In response has become cynical.  Another group has become nuts and has fallen back on lying, cheating and illogic to deal with Trumpist.

Be that as it may, Trump is not the man who can save the world.  There has to be a Trumpist figure or a Trumpist movement that can carry on the fight.  

One of Trump’s problems is his ego.  This doesn’t make him any different from other politicians.  They all have the same problem as their pursuit of public office shows.  Trump is however going after DeSantis which is not a good thing to be doing.

Who are the famous Chinese people I know?  Xi and Ma.  That’s it.

Back to being silly on purpose.

When I see drivers ahead of me in traffic doing retarded things.  I like to look at them and see what their demographic is.  Are they men?  Are they women?  Are they on their dumb phones? On these questions, I see no major trend, except for the fact that they are all Chinese.

Not that I am a great driver myself anymore.  Driving in China has corrupted me. I have become an impatient prick.

And also a resentful prick of a driver.  I get annoyed when drivers pass or outmaneuver me.  Mind you, some of this annoyance is justified because many of these drivers are being overly aggressive and have forced me to brake or slow down suddenly.  My usual practice is to honk my horn at them but since Chinese drivers use their horns a lot, the driver being honked at probably isn’t the least bit feeling chided or embarrassed.  I should just put up with it and thank my guardian angel I’ve never gotten into an accident.

I admit that a big portion of my annoyance at local drivers is because they are on the road and thus in my way.  But factoring that in, there are still a lot of over aggressive drivers and inattentive drivers that I am right to complain about.  And the habit of local drivers to turn without looking is egregious.

All this typing about Chinese drivers is all as a sort of preamble to an incident I initiated one Saturday as I was driving my son Tony to his drumming lesson.  On a road that runs below the Wuxi apartment, a driver tried to

pass me and I decided to make it tough for him.  This particular road is a one laner going either way so that the driver passing me was driving in the opposing lane.  I sped up and the driver had to speed up even more to get ahead of me because a car was coming.  I drove beside him later and glared at him.  I was trying to act tough and not at all sheepish.  Was I a prick to have done this?  Most certainly! Can I rationalize what I did?  Well, you can rationalize anything, but was I right to have done that?  Sigh. Probably not.