Gratitude:
Thank God for
holidays!
Acknowledgement:
I let my son get away with too
many bad habits. I have a hard
time getting him to respect my authority. He sees me more as an
older brother than a father.
Requests:
I want some solutions or some
decisions made about my
quandaries. I have to make these decisions but I wish I had a strong
inclinations to make my decisions easy. I want no more hemming and
hawing.
The
AKIC Week in Brief: It was a
holiday for me except for Thursday and Friday. I had three good
meals in a restaurant. I watch three movies on my Ipad.
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!
我的爱好是博客和学习中国和视频。我很喜欢看书，看电影，和看火车。
I
am Canadian!
You could say Canada is a shitty little country with a lot of land.
I would be lying if I said that thought never crossed my mind. But
if asked to sign a testament saying I agreed with that thought, I
wouldn't because it is not completely
true (Also, it would upset people) Canada is a country with an
identity crisis. It is great but it doesn't know why. It is not
satisfied with its greatness as it is, and is trying to be something
that it isn't.
I
am Latvian (sort of)! I can't
think of anything original to say about my Lativian-ness. So, I will
say it again. My father was from Riga. My mother was from Bauska.
They left Latvia when the Soviet Communist
armies came into their country in 1945. My parents were eventually
able to make it to Canada. In fact, it was in Canada that they meet.
Wuxi
Peach Maoists Update: Visit here
to find out how your Peach Maoists did in week four.
Politically
I am Conservative/Reactionary!
What is the difference between Fascism and Communism? Not much.
Aren't reactionaries Fascist? No. The Left's labelling of its
opponents is all wrong.
I
teach English! Conversational
English that is.
I
am not a freak! It is more apt
to say that I am a victim of the modern age and Leftist thinking.
I
like to Read! Here
is what I had been working my way through the past week:
Don
Colacho's 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 my weekly blog entry. (See below)
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 #173 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 King James Version. This past week, I
have finished reading the First, Second, and Third Epistles General
of John.
Columns
by Father Schall. I have been
able to take all
his archived writings and place them on the Dotdotdot app.
The
Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Like Father Schall's writings, I have been able to place its contents
on the Dotdotdot app.
The
Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence. Finished. David
Warren recommended this book despite, he said, its having flaws. I
notice the flaws as the book gets into the 1980s. You would think it
was drawn from sources approved by the Chinese Communist Party,
relying too much on statistical tables and party documents. But this
is not to say that it was an uncritical book, for the book ends with
the 1989 Beijing massacres. However, one reads the book and suspects
that is so much that hasn't been learned about the Cultural
Revolution and the Beijing Massacres, and probably won't till the
current regime in China is changed and archives become accessible to
historians.
Mao
Zedong: Man, Not God by Quan Yanchi. A Hagiography given to me
by a local.
Quo
Vadis by Henrik Sienkiewicz. One of the first Catholic novels if
my source on the Internet is to be believed. I put the book on my
Ipod, thinking I would read it when I didn't have access to my Ipad,
but now I am reading it on my Ipad.
Sophie
Q's Diary by Ding Ling. A short story I read after mention of it
was made in The Search for Modern China. Ding Ling, I read, became a
hardline Communist who was charged with Rightism during the Cultural
Revolution and thus did five years of hard labour before she was
rehabilitated. The story itself seemed nothing special to mebut was
revolutionary when written because of its frank display of a young
woman's sexual feelings.
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.
I
like to make videos
Here
is my
Youtube Channel and my
Youku Channel.
I
like to cut and paste quotations:
Don
Colacho:
277
Our aspirations, in someone else’s mouth, usually come across to
us as irritating stupidity. [I want to be a writer, for
instance.]
285
The unbeliever is dumbfounded that his arguments do not alarm the
Catholic, forgetting that the Catholic is a vanquished unbeliever.
His objections are the foundations of our faith. [That is why
Simon of the Desert can be considered a Catholic movie]
304
The fool does not content himself with violating an ethical rule:
he claims that his transgression becomes a new rule.
305.
In a bourgeois country, just as in a Communist land, they
disapprove of “escapism” as a solitary vice, as a debilitating
and wretched perversion. Modern society discredits the fugitive so
that no one will listen to his account of his journey. Art or
history, man's imagination or his tragic and noble destiny, these are
not criteria which modern mediocrity will tolerate. “Escapism”
is the fleeting vision of abolished splendors and the probability of
an implacable verdict on today's society. [Funny, I have read
Colacho's 2988 aphorisms two times and I don't remember being struck
by the aptness of this aphorism till this week. It seems that we are
daily bombarded with images of escapism but it is a modern escapism
that seems to offer one the option of having one's cake and being
able to eat it too. This modern escapism is also ironical. But it
is an irony that bites the hand that feeds it. This modern escapism
is full of style. The escapist of mass entertainment is cool and the
one thing that is necessary for this cool escapist is sex. Real
escapism escapes sex. Real escapism is monastical. Thus real
escapism cannot be accepted by the real world.]
(As
you had guessed, the CanLit crowd is more inbred that the mythical
“hillbillies” who populate their treasured anti-American fever
dreams.) At one of Lord Black’s London dinner parties, diplomat (!)
Daniel Bernard famously called Israel a “shitty little
country,” a remark Lady Black duly reported and condemned in
the Daily Telegraph. Although my fellow Canadian, the former
Barbara Amiel, is conventionally patriotic, I wonder if she’d agree
with me that at times like this, that inelegant phrase is a pretty
apt description of “our home and native land.” [I
commented on this quote,
earlier in this entry in the Canada section.]
I
went to a talk addressed by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who
wrote this really terrific book about our moral faculty.
The big takeaway from the book (though there is much, much more in it
than just this) is that our moral intuitions can be modeled in five
dimensions: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal,
Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. People who identify
as liberal are strong on the first two dimensions but light on the
other three; conservatives are better balanced. That made liberals
mad (see the one-star reviews on Amazon), though Haidt says he’s
mainly liberal in sentiments. [The
people I know of are particularly unbalanced
on the Sanctity/Degradation front. The model of moral intuition does
seem very compelling and reasonable to my way of thinking. However,
I don't think of myself as being balanced even though I am of the
conservative and reactionary persuasion. How is my moral intuition
unbalanced? Probably on the Care/Harm dimension. I have a nasty
habit of being selfish.]
I
fashion myself to be a 21st Century Pepys
