Live Earth

I will ask my students if they heard about the Live Earth concerts intended to promote panic and fear-mongering over supposive global catastrophes that is said will be brought about by global warming.  I knew about it only because media outlets unsympathetic to the movement mentioned it was taking place.

Live Earth like every other charity rock concert or festival before it is an exercise in listening to music with a little thought given to the issue at stake.  In the case of Live Earth, it is probably a good thing most people attended for the music.  The issue as presented by Al Gore is bogus. 

Poll of the students about Jihadism.

I asked the students if they thought the Bombers in England were mad Jihadists or mad about the Iraqi War.  They voted 14 to 5 for the latter option.  I can't believe so many thought they were mad Jihadists.  They must not have understood the question.  Their government pumps them the line about the whole Arab world being angry about the Iraqi war.

Does not Bi-Partisanship mean compromise and there is not a bad thing?

Compromise is the essence of democracy.  You can't expect to get everything you want from the legislative process.  And if you did, you would be a dictator.

But Bi-Partisanship is still a dirty word.   It is a way to make compromise seem more palatable to the the voting public.  I will do things in the spirit of Bi-Partisanship! says the politician.  But saying that means you don't have tell the voters what it is you believe in.  It also means you are weak.  A politician has to say what he believes in and accept the consequences.   Being a nice Bi-Partisan guy may seem a good way to appeal to 90 percent of the population.  But the only people who have achieved such pluralities in elections weren't nice guys at all. 

When you enter the political process, you have to be a mud-slinging son-of-a-bitch to accomplish anything.  Mud-slinging is also the essence of democracy.   So, instead of trying to evade this unpleasant fact about democracy, politicians should just get it on and behave in the most partisan ways possible till the compromise has to occur.

 

 

A Bi-Partisan Republican may get Democrats to like him but he won't get any money from them.

Responsibility in the Wuxi Water Crisis.

 I asked a salon class about responsibility in the Wuxi Water Crisis.  Was the local Wuxi government irresponsible during the crisis? 

The students actually shirked the question.  The general consensus was that the government should have been more responsible by making laws to make all people in Wuxi more responsible.

Is the Bush presidency dead in the water?  It still has 18 months in office.  It will have history to vindicate it.  But who knows what will happen in the next 18 months?  Bush could turn into a pacifist and not earn the acclaim of the Left.  Of course, he would then not earn the vindication of history.    A writer on the left suggested that since Bush will never earn high favorable ratings for the rest of his presidency, he should just take the moral high road.  He could do this, the writer suggested, by forming a committee of prominent advisors from both major U.S. political parties and work them in a bi-partisan manner.  Two things wrong with this.  First, he has already taken the moral high road.  Second, bi-partisanship is a dishonest and cowardly way to avoid taking a stand on any issue.

Flooding in Wuxi. Wuxi Jenny Pregnancy Update V2 now on Youtube!!

Walking about town with the wife today, I noticed the local papers had all sorts of photos of flooded streets.  One photo showed a couple of taxis barreling through about two feet of water.  I got the wife to read the paper for me and she told me the flooding happened on Zhongshan Road near NanChang Market  because of the heavy rain that fell Wednesday morning. 

I was told that one of the vice mayors of Wuxi said that there was to be a lot of sewer work being done this summer.  Yes,  all of Wuxi would soon have sewers.  I wondered if the flooding was because of some fuck-up on the part of the Wuxi city works.  It wouldn't surprise me.

The heavy rain makes a brief appearance in my latest Youtube video:

The British Bombers were Medical people. This blog is going political.

What does it say about the NHO in England if some of the people working in it are incompetent terrorists?

This blog which was intended to be the journal of my Wuxi doings and whatever random stuff I am thinking of has turned into a political blog lately because it can only be gotten to in China via proxy.  Since a rare soul in China is reading it, I will say whatever I want political here.  If China ever unblocks blogspot, AKIC blogspot will change its focus again.

This is my blog website of choice.  I love the layout.  I love the look.  It is bookish and elegant.

Scooter Libby pardon?

It wasn't a pardon.  It was a commuting of a sentence.  Not a full blown pardon.  Was Bush being the compromising politico?

England under attack.

What is happening in England now is proof  that there is a movement whether in Islam or in the Middle East  that has to be extinguished, not compromised with.   A madness has infected a portion of Islamic Arabs that is akin to the madness that affected a portion of the German, Japanese and Italian populations in the 1930s and 1940s.  And every culture and nation in the world has it mad portions of the population.  We would not need jails if this weren't so.  And for whatever reason the madness of a portion of the human race becomes big enough to affect more than just a few innocent bystanders.   It affects nations and the very structures of order and civilization.  Islamo-Fascism is now that way.

For the Chinese, July 1 means the return of Hong Kong. Saddam did not deserve the Death Penalty say the students.

The big news for the Chinese students was the anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China.  They were not brazen enough to call it a liberation.  They did not give a tinker's tuss about Canada Day. 

I asked the students in my Sunday afternoon Speakers' Corner to tell me what came to mind when I said the word Canada.  The common responses were: Norman Bethune, Snow, Lots of Land, and I don't know.  Another student said that Canada was a way to get to America.  I remember back in the day when I was in Canada it was a great joke among Canadians to tell stories about how ignorant Americans were about Canada.  Living in China, I see that ignorance of things Canadian is universal.  They never mentioned Beavers, Ice Hockey, U.N. peacekeeping, Wayne Gretzky, Pierre Trudeau, the RCMP or Multiculturalism.

In my crime and punishment salon class, I asked the students if Saddam deserved the death penalty.  All of them said no.  They said the Americans should not have killed the leader of  a  foreign country.  No point in telling them that the Iraqis did it themselves and that no one pined for him since he was dead.