WEB English Troubles, LeBron 1, LeBron 2, Bookworm Room Podcast, chicom Social Media Police, LeBron 3

• WEBi or WEB International English, a competitor of my school, is having some financial difficulties. They have given some their students to EF and haven't paid their teachers. Not a good sign for the industry which has employed all the years I have been in China. I am not sure how Wuxi WEBi is affected because the WEB organization is big and a franchise operation. From my mutterings in this blog, my very rare readers will know that I don't associate with many foreigners. I am a kind of exile/recluse in the Wuxi Expatdom. So, I would only be able to give third or fourth hand information. What does it mean for me? It is time to bail.

• I wonder how LeBron James is perceived in China. He was popular before. I wonder if his comments on the tweet by the Rockets GM has been given media attention in China and if this is so, how his popularity would be affected. Would he be more of a hero? If I had students to talk to – right now, I don't have many – I would ask them.

• I just read the LeBron is not popular in Hong Kong. His image and his jerseys are being burnt by protesters. And it just so happens that Tony has a very expensive LeBron Lakers Jersey made by Nike. That jersey along with Tony's Harden jersey and Rockets' Cap are jinxed.

• I forgot to mention a podcast that I have been listening to on a regular basis: Bookworm Room's Podcast. The hostess sensibly talks about matters political and cultural.

• A thing I was told: You cannot criticize Xi Jing Ping on Chinese social media. The chicom social media police will come down on you.

• A student did tell me that LeBron's comments are known by mainland Chinese. She didn't have much an opinion on, being a woman and not a basketball fan.

Storm-Troopers; E-Bike Spill Witnessed; Yao Ming CBA Ad, “Crushed bodies and shattered bones”; Upcoming SPC Topics; Go Exposnats!

• I wish I had thought of that! A few AKIC blog entries earlier, I mentioned an encounter I had with yellow jacketed police types that I had been seeing in the area of Stately Kaulins Manor. When I described them, I should have said they were storm-trooper like. Androgynous storm-trooper like!

• I saw these storm-troopers on Monday, October 14^th (Canadian Thanksgiving which I didn't it was realize till it was too late). What happened was I was walking in a bike lane when I felt the wake of a food-delivery driver (on e-bike) riding past by me. I wouldn't have thought anything more of it but the driver had a tumble. So, it was the whizz of the wake immediately followed by the sound and fury of the e-bike spinning and twisting to rest on the pavement. I thought that the driver was severely injured and that his e-bike was totalled. But he got up, brushed himself off, and stood his e-bike upright. I then saw three storm-troopers run up to him. They seemed to be giving him the business and one of them was taking photos. Did the driver have a spill because he was going too fast when he saw the storm-troopers?

• Where's Yao Ming during this NBA – chicom kerfuffle? I wouldn't know, but I did see his smiling face on an advertising screen in an elevator in the building where my dear wife Jenny has an office. The ad seemed, with the sponsorship of China Life Insurance, to be trying to push the CBA (Chinese Basketball Association) on the Chinese public. I haven't meet anyone in China who thinks that the CBA is anything but second rate compared to the NBA.

• "Crushed bodies and shattered bones" I suppose I won't be talking to any students about Hong Kong. If they do up, and I will pretend to be ignorant and ask questions using the Socratic method.

• Some of my upcoming Speakers Corners' topics: Hope and Despair, Monarchy, and Metaphysics. I have used more words that I will probably have students for these classes.

• The Montreal/Washington Exposnationals are in the World Series! Go Exposnats! They will meet with the New York Highlanders/Yankees or the Houston Colt 45's/Astros in the 2019 World Series.

Tony Has a Good Line, The B Stands for Back-Down, Luxury Talk, Dave Goldman Says, What I Want for My Son, Any Wuxi Accident

• The St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Atlanta Braves in a decisive game of a best of five series by scoring ten runs in the top of the first inning. Tony had a good line about this. The Atlanta fans should have asked for their money back!

• NBA. The National Back-Down Association. You got to like that. I will be using this phrase for a long time.

• I do some Free Talk Speakers Corners. That is, conversation classes where I haven't chosen a topic. I have decided to do some Speakers Corners where the topic is Expensive Talk and Luxury Talk.

• John Derbyshire, quoting David Goldman, says China will be eating the West's lunch in ten years. I hope not. And being aware of Chinese deficiencies, I am lead to doubt it. But when I go back to Canada and the States, or follow their news, I am well aware that the West is dead determined on descending into stupidity, that America's and Europe's time may well be past, and that there is probably not much that can be done about it, save a lot of progressives and globalists having sense knocked into them. Contrariwise with China, the only hopes are the Chinese rise up against their Chicom oppressors, the Chinese go off the demographic cliff, Chinese fall victim to their lack of imagination, or many Chinese die in a big plague caused by their environmental problems or bad sanitation.

• I don't want Tony to live in a world shaped by lies or avoidance of inconvenient facts.

• Another Day in Wuxi, another disaster. This time, this time six killed an explosion in south Wuxi. Lots of video of it taken.

Saturday Morning Annoyances, Wuxi Police Chief, Hanging Out with No One, AKIC Watches TV Series, AKIC Reads, More about the NBA

• Saturday Morning, October 12^th, I had a day-time shift (with no classes to teach because Saturday was a school and work day in China.). Before going to work, I drove Tony to his school. After dropping him off and being waved through a crosswalk, I had a car that had been on my left pulled in front of me to drop off somebody. I honked at the car because I was annoyed at being cut off. One of the passengers got out of the car and glared at me. I glared back at him and mouthed the words "fuck off!" The car eventually drove on and went back into the left lane. I passed the car on the right and gave the passengers the finger. I am sure they saw me do it. I dropped the car off back at the Stately Kaulins Manor parking spot, and got on a bus that took me to a Metro station. On the platform, I was standing to wait, but not on the line as it were, and this woman took up the spot in front of me. I wanted to tell her off but I didn't. I took the metro downtown, got out, and was walking on Zhongshan Road towards my school when I witnessed this SUV driver make a very quick turn through pedestrians. Icehole!! I notice "things" about the locals, and recently, I am really starting to despise them. I hope it doesn't get me into trouble. I can say that my "incident" encounters with Chinese have been because I was provoked.

• A Wuxi police chief, or the Wuxi police chief, apparently got the sack because he was seen at the scene of the Wuxi Highway Collapse wearing a very expensive watch. Or so I have heard from people in Winnipeg. Now, I have been told that this rumor was caused by someone try to get more followers on their social networking site.

• These days in Wuxi, it is probably good that I don't have any Chinese friends. The times are very politically sensitive. I also don't want to hangout with expatriates. Like the NBA, we have all compromised ourselves. They can deal with it by hating Trump; I cannot. I can only deal with being here by thinking like a reactionary Catholic dissident.

• I do spend the great deal of spare time I have watching TV series. I just finished watching the ITV series A Confession about the real life travails of the policeman Steve Fulcher. It was a great show that had the emotional impact of the first season of Broadchurch. I watched the first episode of the Spy starring the Sacha Baron Cohen guy. It didn't anything for me. I am three episodes into a series called Top Boy, a drug dealer drama. I do like these sort of shows. I have watched seasons of The Wire and Narcos. But, I don't know if I can stick with Top Boy. It actually gets strangely cringe-worthily sentimental in parts. I may try watching a show called Succession and finished Ken Burns' Country Music, while I wait for the sixth season of Bosch.

• I am also doing a lot of reading. Currently, I am reading Castle to Castle by Celine, The Great Papal Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, and 50 Things They Don't Want to Know by Jerome Hudson. So, one fiction, one religious and one political. Oh! How I wish I could just read one book after another! (Go back in this blog and you will find my lists of books read in previous years.)

• More thoughts on the NBA. The chicoms are what they are. Have no illusions about them. But the NBA's absolute cravenness is more and more galling when one becomes aware of their past activities. While afraid to stand up to the chicoms, the NBA was not afraid to take the state of North Carolina to task for not wanting degenerates to go into women's bathroom, or to make a point of snubbing President Trump. One can only gleam from their actions that they love money, that they hate normal Americans, and that they love degeneracy where they can get away with it.

312 Collapse, How it Affects AKIC, Not busy, My Current Podcast Listening Habits, Li Xiao Ming, A Victim Was from NKCS

• The 312 road where the Highway Collapse happened was empty on the morning of the 11^th. Usually, these days, I take the 25 bus to get to and from school. The 25 bus does go under another stretch of 312 overpass. In fact, the intersection where the 25 goes under looks a lot like the intersection where the collapse happened. I had a shift at school on the 11^th, but I choose to take the train which goes over the 312 instead because I was curious to see what the traffic was like. I recorded what I saw using my Iphone.

• The collapse affects me because going to the Ikea Mall and getting our car serviced will not be so easy for however long it takes to repair the section of road.

• I am not at all busy at school which is why I have been blogging on an almost daily basis.

• I have also been listening to a lot of podcasts. I like to say I am downloading them in a manual manner. I am not using a podcast app, but instead use my Feedly rss reader which alerts me to when new podcast episodes are available. I then download them using a browser (Safari on my Mac, Brave on the PC I use at work), and put them into my VLC app to listen to them. My favorite podcasts include the Dennis Miller Option, Radio Derb, the Z Blog Power Hour, The Delingpod, London Calling, GLOP, Patrick Coffin, Contra Krugman, and the Kunstler Podcast, to name a few.

• Interestingly, Li Xiao Ming, the Wuxi communist party chairman was at the scene of the collapse. I mock this chairman for his ubiquitousness on Wuxi Metro video screens and his comb-over hairdo.

• Sadly, I have a connection, though very very tenuous, to one of the victims of the highway collapse. A kindergarten teacher from Nanwei King's College School was driving home from the school and had the horrible misfortune of being under the section of highway when it collapsed. She and her daughter were killed. Last spring, Jenny & I looked at the possibility of having Tony attend that school and visited its campus. NKCS is located near the Coastal City Shopping Mall in an area which I would otherwise have had no reason to be at. Jenny was still getting updates from the school and received the news that the woman's car was seen in the video of the collapse.

Wuxi Highway Collapse, NBA in Shanghai, Airbrushing of the Houston Rockets, End Result?, Too Much Tolerance, The Cause of the Collapse?

• I was at work when I heard about the Wuxi Highway Collapse. It turned out that the collapse occurred on a stretch of highway (the 312) that I have often driven to get to the Wuxi Ikea Mall and the dealership where we get our car serviced. My wife Jenny doesn't like driving the road because of all the commercial trucks that are on it. I find driving it to be a bit of an adventure. The trucks on this road are on every lane because the rule of slower vehicles to the right is not observed in China. The road is also peculiar in that there were a couple side roads which vehicles could enter from without merging lanes. And the road is often strewn with fallen debris from trucks and will often be rutted because of the heavy trucks.

• The news of the highway collapse interrupted my following of what was going on vis-a-vis the NBA kerfuffle with the chicoms. The game in Shanghai was played, but without much fanfare and without national anthems being played.

• When I got home, Tony told me that Houston Rockets merchandise was no longer available on Taobao. So, wonder if it is a good idea for him to wear his James Harden Shirt or the bright red Rockets hat which I bought for him in Canada.

• What will be the end result of the NBA – chicom kerfuffle? A colleague at work speculated that it would be forgotten in two months and that everyone would be happily watching their NBA again. I expressed doubt about this because it is tied to what is happening in Hong Kong. I did learn from my colleague that "live" European Football Matches broadcast in China are shown on a tape-delayed basis because of pro-Tibet protesters liking to display signs at them. This will happen to NBA games because already HK signs are showing up at NBA games in America.

• Why do mainland Chinese put up with the chicoms? When will they get sick of the banning of things and the censorship?

• The highway collapse is being officially blamed on an overloaded truck. It is what the government would say, they have been saying. I would guess that the collapse was the result of a bunch of factors: poor highway design, poor highway maintenance, shoddy construction, and lack of traffic rule enforcement – the latter factor resulting in an overloaded truck bringing down the overpass. But I doubt that the truck was the heaviest truck in history to have been on the road. The road, as I say, from having driven it many times, is an adventure to drive. It has a third-world China feel to it.

NBA – chicom Kerfuffle, Tony, Opportunity Missed, One Student, A Report from Hong Kong, Motorcycle Cops

• The NBA – chicom kerfuffle has me visiting NBA sites more than I ever would have otherwise. The NBA's popularity in mainland China, which I have been aware since I came to Wuxi in 2004, has always disappointed me. I always wished that the Chinese could have liked Baseball, American Football and Ice Hockey more. Of the major sports leagues, the NBA is the one I least follow. But the kerfuffle which had political and cultural ramifications has interested me greatly.

• Returning to Stately Kaulins Manor on the evening of October 9^th, I found that my son Tony didn't seem fazed at all by the NBA and South Park kerfuffles. He was keen to tell me about the performance of some player in an NBA exhibition game. Whoever he was, he had gotten 34 points. And when I showed him the China Band South Park episode, he found it funny without seeing the controversy.

• When the Kaulins family was in Shanghai, we saw a big video board advertising the NBA exhibition game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets. I thought to get a photo of Tony standing beside it because he had expressed an interest in seeing the game. But I changed my mind about it, and now I regret it, especially, since I read that all that advertising has been taken down.

• I was keen to talk about the NBA controversy with students but only one showed up to my evening Speakers Corner. And the student was a woman.

• I did have a student, a doctor at a hospital nearby our school, who had spend five days in Hong Kong. She told me that there weren't many shoppers in Hong Kong and that the store owners were regretting it.

• In the area around Stately Kaulins Manor, I see lots and lots of police. They wear all sorts of uniforms and can be seen driving in all manner of vehicles including cars, vans, pick-up trucks, e-bikes and motorcycles. Recently, I have been seeing these slickly dressed motorcycle cops riding round in groups of four motorcycles (I say this because the ones I had seen before were paired on one bike.) They wear combat boots, tightly padded cargo pants, and florescent yellow jackets with all sorts of pockets for radios and other equipment. They often are stopped at intersections and I have seen them harassing the the operators of e-bikes and other small vehicles. On the evening of October 9^th, I was walking home from the subway station, and came upon the four cops standing around an e-biker who had an umbrella attached to her e-bike. They didn't so much look to be giving her the business as just standing around, I thought. I walked as close to them as I could and stared at them, and one of them said hello to me, in what I thought was a prissy way – that is, in the way most Chinese greet passing foreigners walking down a street.

South Park China Band, Five Star Flags, Decoupling, New Groups of Kiddies, … Celine … , Watching S23E02 in Public

• My son Tony's favorite TV series, South Park, has been banned in China. He loves South Park for swearing and the humor. I worry about exposing him to the show's vulgarity and toilet jokes, but I do like the fact that the show parodies everything, so that the reactionary in me can watch it and get some chuckles. I want Tony to grow up with no illusions about the world and South Park is no better way to help with this goal. As soon as I heard about the show's creators' mock apology to the chicoms after being banned, I had to download and watch the episode that lead to the banning. Episode S23E02 mocks the brutality of the chicom regime but it also mocks the cravenness of westerners coming to chicom China to make money while sacrificing their values of decency and the livelihoods of their fellow countrymen.

• As I walk about Wuxi, I pass video screens showing images of Chinese happily (or obediently) waving five star flags.

• Decoupling: the ending of China being part of America's supply chain. I have been teaching this word to the few students I have in Speakers Corners. I can't see it not happening. The NBA kowtow and the Southpark banning surely represent a point from which there is no turning back. The reaction to the NBA kowtow was bi-partisan, and the Southpark China Band episode is sure to get a lot of viewership in America and China.

• I have some new groups of young kids to teach. In one group, one of the girls had been brought to tears by a male classmate, and I felt sorry for her. But as the class went on, and the girl cheered up, I saw that my first impression of her was not at all correct. The girl revealed herself to be, pardon my English, a bit of a bitch. I have seen a lot of kids in my time in China, and there are kids with general likable dispositions and kids who are preternaturally malevolent. If the latter are female, they have a truly bitchy disposition. One can only hope, they have a good level of English so you can at least joke with them.

• I am reading Celine … Paul Grant … Is that his name? … Anyway, the Canadian Philosopher who wrote Lament for a Nation … He says the trilogy Celine wrote after WW2 is classic … I think of Celine as the ultimate Misanthrope … What is the antidote to Racism or whatever it is that gets people think racism is a bad thing? … Misanthropy … Hate people because of whatever they happen to be …

• One more thing about Southpark. I put the episode on my Iphone and made a point of watching it in public when I was on the bus and on the metro.

Another Thing about Tim Hortons Shanghai, NBA Kowtow, PRC – CCCP, JW, More Catch with Tony, No Reason to go to the Big Smoke

• Another things about the Tim Hortons in Shanghai that we went to: I didn't see a picture of Tim Horton anywhere. I don't know if this was an oversight on the part of the Chinese operator of Tim's we went to or if it was a conscious decision.

• The NBA kowtow to China was sad. It really hit home with me when I saw Tony reading the letter the league published to China on the NBA.com. I would boycott the league outright but Tony follows it and he is too young to do things for political reasons.

• Can the PRC outlast the CCCP? The PRC has last 70 years. The CCCP about 74 years.

• I want to call Wuxi "JW". "JW" meaning Jiangsu, Wuxi. I like saying "Jay Double U!". It sounds better than saying "Double U, X".

• Another session of catch with Tony. I chided him for being scared of the ball, and told him if that if he really wanted to play ball, as he said he did, he would have to try to catch balls thrown at him much faster and harder than I was throwing them at him.

• There is no reason for me to visit Shanghai more than I have been visiting it the last five years.