Gratitude:
I am thankful for
the times the truth is revealed to me.
Acknowledgement:
I have to stop living in my
mind and grasp the things
that I know I need. No one is going to give them to me.
Requests:
Since I can't expect
anything to be given to me, I shouldn't request it. I pray for the
welfare of others, and that my enemies will see the light. I do hope
I can have the good fortune to meet some good people I can befriend.
But even then, you got to create your own fortune.
The
AKIC Week in Brief: Another
boring week in Akicistan. I was driven to a the administrative
center of the new Wuxi CBD in a black Audi. A highlight of sorts I'd
suppose.
About
AKIC: If you want to learn
what Andis & AKIC are
all about, you
can visit here.
If
there are things about AKIC you don't know
about, like places and people I mention in the entries below, you can
go here to
find out what they are all about.
AKIC
Weekly Features:
I
in in China!
我的家有两个卧室。我孩子的拼音是不好。我孩子是不好的学生。
I
am Canadian!
I still don't want Rob Ford
to resign. Toronto should be thankful for the attention.
I
am Latvian (sort of)! My
middle name is Edmunds.
Reading
Anne Applebaum's Gulag, I realize I should thank my lucky stars that
my parents were able to get out of Latvia in the 1940s before the
Russians came in.
Wuxi
Peach Maoists Update: Visit here
to find out how if your Peach Maoists (1-8-1) can get a winning
streak going.
Politically
I am Conservative/Reactionary!
Better to have a conservative who smokes crack as your mayor than a
Leftist. Rob Ford was at least drunk when he smoked cracked. A
modern progressive/leftist/democrat(U.S.)/socialist smokes crack when
sober.
I
teach English! Is there
a way, I can make the headline of this section appear ironic?
Really,
I talk to the students hoping to educate by entertaining them. Beats
me if they learn anything.
I
am not a freak! I try hard, in
a monkish sort of way, to not be one.
I
like to Read! Here
is what I had been working my way through the past week:
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.
Now that I have finished the Catechism, I will read this and then
begin to read the 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 #179 this week 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.
Mao
Zedong: Man, Not God by Quan Yanchi. A Hagiography given to me
by a local. [The Chinese who protested against Jimmy Kimmel's six
year old child by posting a picture of Kimmel with a Hitler
moustache, could also have put a Mao mole on Kimmel's face while they
were at it. Hitler never killed any Chinese that I know of. Mao did
however. In fact, he killed a lot.]
Gulag
by Anne Applebaum. Many Balts,
from whom I am descended, were taken to the Gulag. I thank my lucky
stars that my parents, who were born in Latvia, were able to get out
before the Soviets came in.
I
like to take photos
I
publish them in the following blogs: AKIC
wordpress , TKIC
blogspot,
TKIC
wordpress, Views
of China from Casa Kaulins Blogspot and Views
of China from Casa Kaulins Wordpress. It is my habit to take a
least one photo of Tony a day and publish it in TKIC wordpress. I
also try to capture interesting things that pass by the Casa Kaulins
apartment, either on video on still image, and publish them in Views
of China from Casa Kaulins.
I
like to make videos
Here
is my
Youtube Channel and my
Youku Channel.
I
like to cut, paste, and sometimes give my take on quotations:
Nicolas
Gomez Davilla
497
To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discrete life among
intelligent books, loving a few beings. [That is the life!]
498
A sentence should be hard like a rock and shake like a
branch. [To be honest, I am not sure what that means even though
I like the sound of it. If I do ever figure out what this aphorism
means, I wonder if I will be able to apply it to the sentence making
the students do for me.]
505
To educate the soul consists in teaching it to transform its envy
into admiration. [Get rid of envy and you should cease to be a
Leftist, a progressive, a Communist, a Socialist, and so on....]
509
Society tends to be unjust, but not in the way the conceited
imagine. There are always more masters who do not deserve their
position than servants who do not deserve theirs. [I
am part of the servant class.
No way I could be a master.]
510
Resistance is futile when everything in the world is
conspiring to destroy what we admire. We are always left, however,
with an incorruptible soul, so that we might contemplate, judge, and
disdain. [I like this quote because it ends with the word
“disdain.” But I wonder about the state of my soul. I like the
word “disdain” for the wrong reasons: pride.]
519:
Happiness is that state of the sensibility in which everything
appears to have a reason for being. [This
is only true if souls exist.]
David
Warren:
1)We
are small & squalid & statistical, perhaps not even worth
punishing. Our men are not men & our women are not women. Look at
the vacant faces in the streets, blindly clutching their mall
purchases. What god, what demon, could be bothered to regard our
“public opinion”?
The
debt crises in Europe & America, the omnipresence of “the NSA,”
the conspicuous failure of schemes like Obamacare, the smug look on
politicians’ faces, frustrations associated with longer commuting
times & diminishing real wages — these are all little triggers.
We are like union members in a company whose managers are too
obviously incompetent to sustain their arrogance. And we are tired of
obeying their innumerable, fussy little rules. My hunch is that there
is going to be a strike.
2)Our
very Anglo-Saxon, gliberal answer to our own racialism is “reverse
discrimination.” This reverses the polarity, but on the same
magnet.
Indeed,
the election of the inexperienced, foolish, unqualified, excessively
vain & deluded, obviously incompetent Barack Obama as President
of those United States was, to my mind, not an indication that
America was putting racialism behind her, but rather that it could
not be overcome. He was elected because he was black, &
that made the whites voting for him feel good about themselves. Had
he been superficially a white man (as he might have been, had the
Mendelian genetic dice rolled the other way), he would never have
been taken seriously as a presidential candidate. [I
had thought that the only way
a Black could be elected U.S. President would have been if he was a
Republican with the ideas of a Thomas Sowell. That, the first Black
U.S. President is a Democrat shows I was too much of an optimist.
Racialism seems stuck with humans like death and taxes. Sad.]
Excerpt
from Anne Applebaum's Gulag:
Thinking
about his arrest before it happened, Innokenty had pictured to
himself a duel of wits to the death. For this he was ready, prepared
for a high-principled defense of his life and his convictions. Never
had he imagined anything so simple, so dull, and so irresistible as
this reality. The people who had received him were petty-minded,
low-grade officials, as uninterested in his personality as in what he
had done. [I am kicking against
the petty-mindedness and
dullness of my reality. I suppose I could survive in the Gulag.]
Said
about Flannery O'Connor:
She
was always suspicious of her own motives, [Believe
it or not, I am suspicious of
my own motives. And I do find myself checking many things I imagine
I would say if I could. I am what I am.]
GK
Chesterton:
“The
Lord said to love one's enemies. He didn't say anything but not
having them.” [I am typing this quote from memory. A
distinction that is not often thought of by people who aren't
Christian and many who say they are.]
In
the Anglo-Saxon world at least, there seems to be a law of the
conservation of prudery: If we are not prudish about one thing, we
are prudish about another, the total amount of prudery remaining
constant. [I think this
law of the conversation of prudery can be applied to more than just
prudery and the Anglo-Saxon world. Whatever tendencies there are in
the human race, they are constant over time. For example, the
callousness about the fate of people who weren't our own kind has
been replaced by a callousness about the fate of the murdered
unborn.]
Public
transport is the great theatre of the world, which is why I always
take it (whenever I can) in preference to that frightful contraption,
my motor car. You learn so much on public transport; in a car you
just lose your temper. [Actually,
I lose my temper on the bus in Wuxi sometimes. But I would lose my
temper all the time if I drove a car in Wuxi. And there things I see
on the bus that I would never see in a car: lower and lower middle
peasants, for instance.]
The
AKIC List of the Week: AKIC's Top Twelve Americans
- Rush Limbaugh [Warts and all, I thank Limbaugh for the fact that I am a conservative and on the way to being a person of faith.]
- William F Buckley [A Catholic who represented all that was fine about America.]
- Clint Eastwood [How could he not be included on this list?]
- George Washington [Under Chairman Mao, he didn't die in office. He retired to his estate.]
- Frank Sinatra [The greatest singer of all time.]
- Gary Carter [He was my favourite baseball player. A true American golly gee guy who'd be called a phony by Socialist sophisticates. With two outs in bottom of the ninth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, no body on base, his team down by two runs in the game, his team down 3-2 in the best of seven series, Carter got a hit that sparked the greatest rally in World Series history. Hearing of Carter's premature death brought the best and saddest memories of my time following the Montreal Expos from 1979 to 1983.]
- Andrew Breibart [David Warren, on my list of top ten Canadians, said Breibart was a happy warrior in the war against the Left. Hearing of his premature death filled me with immense sadness.
- Thomas Sowell [He is no token black on this list. Along with Rush and WFB, Sowell provided the intellectual proof I needed on my path to becoming a reactionary.]
- Ronald Reagan [The greatest president of my lifetime.]
- Jimmy Stewart [A tall and thin man like myself. He was the rare combination of movie star and decent human being.]
- Anne Coulter [A gutsy broad. An American Margaret Thatcher.]
- Sarah Palin [I still have hope that she can become the first female president of the USA. The woman is salt of the earth. No sage, she is, but she is fill of more common sense that Obama, Biden, or any of the Clintons.]
I
fashion myself to be a 21st Century Pepys
