Got Butter; The Detour; The Before Times; Current Daily Routine; Sociopaths and Psychopaths; the Church Scandals; What to Do When Caught Off Guard.

• In my previous entry, I reported that we were running out of butter and that the stores in our area, where we could expect to buy it, had run out. I can now report that I was able to go to Metro, a wholesale-retail supermarket, and buy six bars of a New Zealand brand butter. I noticed, however, there certain brands of cheese and bacon that we liked to purchase were not available. 

• I drove to the Metro on a truck route where, in the before-times, there had been an overpass collapse. Now, it has a detour which can be perilous to get through because there can be traffic jams and the left turn lanes had to be put in the most right hand lanes. This time, there were a lot of trucks going through the detour and I wasn't sure that I was in a right hand lane to make a u-turn and then left turn to get back on the truck route (thankfully, I was).

• Yes. The before-times. I am using that term. I think things are going to change for China (and the world) if and when this virus crisis comes to an end. Whether the before times ended with the start of the virus crisis or when Chairman Eleven assumed lifetime powers will be one for the historians to decide.

• My days now have a definite routine. I have the alarm set for 6:30 AM. When it awakes me, I first stay in bed and I do some daily readings, on my phone, which are religious and philosophical. (I read books of daily thoughts from the Church fathers and thoughts about Mary, I read some aphorisms from Nicolás Gómez Dávila. This crisis and Lent, I have as well been reading daily passages from the Liturgical Year by Abbot Prosper Gueranger.) With this done, I get out of bed and prepare to wake Tony who has some video classes from his school to watch. I put on the kettle and heat some water for tea. I then get Tony up. He doesn't wake easily and I have to start dressing him until he is awake enough to finish. He then goes to the bathroom to do his ablutions while I set up thecomputer and the Apple TV so he can watch the classes. Tony starts the classes himself and sits on the easy chair in the living room to watch them. I sit beside him on a couch and do daily Spanish, French Chinese lessons on the Duo phone app. Once that is done, I make Tony tea and some breakfast; I maybe do a load of laundry; continue doing some daily readings – this time of a book I am reading (novel or non-fiction work), then some language book readings (Spanish, French, Latvian and Chinese) and then some poetry (The Metaphysical Poets, Gerard Hopkins, an English Poetry Anthology and the german poet Friedrich Hölderlin); I maybe listen to a podcast, I read articles from the Internet using my Feedly RSS app and some other tidying-up that I notice I have to do. Tony meanwhile, having finished watching the video classes, does homework. The assignment are sent, via WeChat, to Jenny who forwards them to me on my WeChat. I air-drop them from my Iphone onto my Ipad. Eventually, Jenny gets out of bed and our relaxed time is finished. When she has finished her ablutions, she will bark at Tony & me for whatever reason, and maybe make us lunch if helping Tony do her homework is not her priority. After lunch, I may go out to pick up deliveries or do some shopping or do a little reading or watch some video or continue reading the novel or non-fiction book I am reading. (anything to get away from Jenny "helping" Tony with his homework) About 4:00 PM, if the weather is good, Tony & I will get out of the house and play catch. When we get back, it is supper time. After supper, Tony will do some more homework, and I will occupy myself (with reading or a video or a podcast) until we can start our 8:00 PM English class. Once this is done, everyone will relax until bedtime. We will shower, watch video, play video games and read till about 11:00 PM, at which time we try to fall asleep and do the same thing the next day....

• I was talking on WeChat with a local acquaintance about video I had been recently watching. I mentioned the Tiger King series that I had just seen and some series that I had been watching from the Investigation Discovery network like Homicide Hunter and one I just discovered: Living with Evil. The latter series has acquaintances and relatives of Murderers describe their relationships with the criminals. Of the six episodes I watched, three of the criminals were husbands to the narraters, one was a brother, one was a step-son, and one was a friend. There were certainly signs that something was not right with these murderers and one could almost wonder why the narraters didn't catch on quicker than they did, until you realized that the signs were incidents that were quickly out of one's mind when things returned to normal. The person I was talking with about this brought up the terms sociopath and psychopath. I had to ask what was the difference between these types of individuals; and from what my acqaintance told me and what I later gleamed from some Internet research that I did that, there wasn't a clear distinction. Both types were certainly evil. I thought psychopaths, compared to sociopaths, were more wild and untamed like predatory animals but it turns out they aren't. Anyway, my chat partner then, out of the blue, brought up Catholic priests and said they were a group with a pathology all their own, and that the priests who did the molesting, or maybe he meant all priests, couldn't be classified homosexuals but as perverse power seekers. All I had to say in response was that that Church scandal was sad. I didn't want to debate the topic because I was caught off guard, and wasn't in a mood for these confrontations that our politicized age has caused. (I wish I asked if Obama was a sociopath, which I thought that narcissists were, earlier but that what's you get for trying not to step on minefields.) 

• Anyway, what are my thoughts on the Church scandals? They were a tragedy. Lots and lots and lots of sincere Catholics were let down. If you believe that what is taught by the Church is true, than the world was been let down. Do I think Priests as a group are bad through and through, as my chat-mate suggested? Of course not. What were the causes of the scandals? Infiltration of the Church by homosexuals and progressives, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. The cover-ups were caused by a combination of a bureaucratic need to shuffle the problem off, and in many cases a desire to be merciful to the offending priest. The desire to be merciful was a mistake and should have been dealt with like a criminal manner and thus handed over to the state. And of course, the devil played a part. 

• I hate being caught off guard like I was about the priest thing. As I said, I don't like these sorts of debates because they can get my blood boiling. I also have discovered that many progressives often throw so-called "facts" at you that you haven't heard of and need to confirm. For example, there have been so many documented cases of people saying things that aren't true about Trump that you have to take all they, the anti-Trumpers, say about him with a grain of salt. (I had someone telling me that Trump and Rush Limbaugh said that the virus was a hoax, which turned out to be a case of they taking what Rush and the Donald had said out of context.) And these progressives, when they do try to argue with you ,only reveal their prejudices and not so much the logic of what they are saying. You can't argue with people like that. And being good at debating does not mean one is good at discerning truth. The latter skill takes a lot of time and doesn't look good in the age of sound bites. Best response (for me) to these progressive verbiage assaults:  yeah, yeah, whatever you say, and hope they shut up.

No Butter; USA-PRC War?; Snoring Videos; Revenge; Three of the Usual; Later, a Bonus

• The two supermarkets in my area of Wuxi don't have butter. We're down to our last bar of it. Now, it's going to become a real ordeal. I decided to look for butter on a Tuesday, and thus it was that I went to the two supermarkets. At the first one I went to, I chanced to observe a car parked/stopped in an inconsiderate manner. It was parked at the end of a narrow two-lane-wide road that had had fences put on the center line. (The fences had been put in the center of the road to stop people from parking on the side and thus leaving effectively one lane for traffic going to both directions. The fencing wasn't put right to the end of the road so as to not block pedestrian traffic. And it was in that space that the car had parked.) The car had effectively blocked one of the lanes and thus traffic was snarled. I then saw the driver of the car running to the car. He was easy to spot because he was going quickly in a panicky way towards his car. He had just picked up some food from a nearby KFC. I looked at his direction and then looked at his car a few times, and he looked at me sheepishly as locals are wont to do when they are caught doing selfish actions. It was the only satisfaction that I was to get in my fruitless search for butter.

• From the reading I have been doing on the Internet and the Chinese media I have seen my wife Jenny looking at, you would think the Chicoms and the USA were going to go to war over this virus. Accusations are flying as to who is responsible and who has been incompetent in dealing with pandemic. Well. I wonder where exactly the two sides would fight a war. There is no place that they are close to each other. I suppose they could fight in the ocean off the coast of China. But probably they would just lob ICBMs at each other. And if they did, I wish the Chicoms would do this: Nuke Seattle, Portland, California, Austin (Texas), and New York City. That would be helping Trump make America great again. (If the Americans asked me where to bomb in China, I'd tell them not to bother. The sheer ugliness of Modern China is punishment enough. Why help them by bombing it to the ground?)

• Jenny has taken two videos of me snoring. The first one, she took while I was taking an afternoon nap. I was on our bed, my head and back were propped up against a rolled-up quilt, fast asleep, snoring through my mouth. The funny thing was that my lower lip was bobbing up and down like it was made of wood. The second video was taken late at night and co-starred my son Tony. We were both snoring so loud. Our snores sounded like loud farts. Tony & I couldn't help but giggle saw it the next morning.

• Tony & I got Jenny back a day later. In the morning, we were up and she was still asleep and snoring. We took a video. She laughed, thankfully, when we showed it to her. To be fair, her snoring did not pack the wallop that ours did.

• Trouble comes in threes. The day after my search for butter, I was driving to do some mule duties for Jenny. Driving to the bakery to pick up some bread (we haven't run out of butter yet!), I ran into my first idiot just as I was exiting the apartment complex. I was making a left turn but stopped for a black SUV that was coming from my right. I was indecisive as to whether to go or not because the SUV wasn't going so fast, but ultimately I decided that it was better to stop. When the SUV finally passed by and the the coast was clear, I made my turn and quickly found myself on the ass of the SUV. It was going very slowly. I was debating whether to pass when it suddenly swerved to the left which led me to think it was going to make a u-turn. I thought to pass it on the right, but as quickly as I thought this, the SUV then made a right turn without a turn signal. Moron #1! Proceeding on my way, I encountered my second moron. I was behind him in the same lane and had a feeling he trying to change into the left lane because his car was slowing down and he seemed to be slowly swerving to the left. But because he was going slow and he was probably being an idiot, I passed around him. I then looked into my rearview mirror and saw the driver make the lane change, I suspected he was going to make, without a turn signal. Nothing to me is more proof positive than this that Chinese drivers are stupid because I have seen them do this all time. Then, after picking up the bread and driving to the mall where I parked our car in the basement so I could pick up packages for Jenny, I got on an elevator and encountered my third case of bad local manners. When it arrived at my floor, I was blocked from getting off from a family of locals trying to get on. I stood at the elevator entrance and waited for them to let me get off, which they finally did. This is one of the first things that people coming to China complain about: Why do the Chinese rush onto elevators without letting people get off first? (I didn't swear at the family who was blocking me. I was able to check myself this time.)

• Later that same day, I drove Tony to this park when we can play catch and Tony can use our bat to hit balls. When we parked, we saw workers were putting up these six foot tall sections of fence to stop park goers from sneaking through woods to get into the park. I was disappointed to see this because we had been sneaking through the woods and it was a bit of a pain to have to walk through the park entrance and go around to get to the field where we did our baseball thing, but what could I do? It really wasn't that far. And the park entrance had a security guard shack. When we got to the field, there were people who were dismantling the BBQ equipment they had been using. We then saw them walking through the woods. And we then heard these people yelling. Looking at what was going on, we saw that the people who had the BBQ were trying to climb over the fences, which must have been put up just after they had snuck through the woods to get to the field where they had had their BBQ. The workers and other park staff were the ones who were screaming. Typical.

Behavior of Mainland Chinese; My Behavior in Mainland China; Got to Behave Like a Roman Catholic; Virus Came from Seattle?; Judging Trump's Performance; Theories about the JFK Assassination; The Situation in Downtown Wuxi at the End of March

• Every once in a while on the Internet, I see a video posted from North America of a person of European origin freaking out on a Chinese person. The posting of the video is accompanied by a headline with the words "racist rant" in them. My immediate reaction is not of disgust as the posters of the video would like me to have, but instead one of sympathy for the ranter followed by curiosity about the circumstances that lead to the recorded incident. I also wonder if the Chinese person comes from the Mainland. Being in Mainland China as long as I have, I have observed the locals behave in ways that would strike North Americans and Europeans as appallingly rude. So many times I have seen the local Chinese cut in line, butt in line, smoke on elevators, spit, litter, cheat in traffic, use their horns impatiently, be impatient in other ways like not wait for people get off elevators or metro trains before getting on, be loud, stare, talk about foreigners in their presence, be stopped in places without regard for how others must proceed, shit and pee in public, be unsanitary, and so on... And much as I hate to say so, the Chicom authorities do make efforts to battle the unruliness of the Chinese masses, but it is the nature of Chinese to game systems and go through their days without much regard for others. Now the locals often seem to tolerate this behavior, but I have had many locals tell me that they hate seeing the behavior I have listed. So it seems that the locals who notice these bad behaviors are either too scared to say anything, or only notice the bad behavior when it intrudes into their normal day-to-day obliviousness to others around them.

• Well, if this is how the Mainland Chinese operate in Mainland China, who am I, an intruder, to complain? I tell myself this, but sometimes the behavior of the locals is so outrageous that I end up losing my temper my temper in the manner of those people who come across Mainland Chinese behavior in North America. Just this Sunday, I got so annoyed at a driver who cut me off that I honked my horn at him for a minute, and later swore at a local male who rushed into an elevator that I was trying to get off of. The driver didn't make a turn signal and the male nearly ran into me. I hate to say it but I have to confess behavior like this makes me think that I really hate Chinese.

• But I want to be a proper Roman Catholic Christian, and it was very disconcerting to me that my losing my temper at the locals during those two incidents did take place between bouts of praying and spiritual reading I was doing. Clearly I am neither doing enough nor taking a right approach in this goal. I do have to make contact with actual Catholics and find out what I should do about my problems with Chinese behavior.

• I don't really pay much attention to the Chinese media. Sometimes I do happen to see my wife looking at it. Recently, I heard some Chinese-accented speaker saying Trump was doing a bad job and it made my blood boil. I told myself I had to walk away from this. I am also getting this impression from the Chinese media reports that they are trying to convey this feeling that China has done so well in dealing with the virus. If some Chinese person asked me if I was happy to be in China at this moment in time, as I am sure they would like to, I would respond that I shouldn't care where am I in the world as long as I was acting like a Christian saint. My wife, sad to say, is being very pro-Chicom and anti-Trump these days. And my son Tony passed onto me a story that the virus originated in Seattle and not Wuhan. That is actually a plausible story because Seattle is one of the most Communist places in North America. If that is the narrative the Chicoms want to put out, I say go for it.

• I think Trump has been a doing a good job as can be expected under the circumstances. Certain writers I respect, who are inclined to be disappointed with Trump but don't suffer from TDS, have been saying he has been doing a good job during the crisis. However, I do fear that the economics of what he has been doing will have grave results in the years ahead. This bailout must surely be inflationary. All I can say in his defense on this score is that if the Democrats completely had their way, things done would have been much, much stupider.

• Bob Dylan just released a song about the Kennedy assassination. Here are two conspiracy that I have thought of to jokingly explain why and how the assassination happened. The first theory is that it was a Joe Biden cockup. Biden sent time travelers into the past (1980) to kill Trump. Trouble was, the killers were Russian and couldn't tell the difference between America 1963 and America 1980, and so they mistakenly killed Kennedy. (Jeffrey Epstein knew about this and so he had to be killed. Biden has talked about doing it but everyone has assumed he was blabbering.) The second theory is that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis did it. How could this be? You ask. Weren't they broken up by then? Of course. That was what everyone was told. So, a perfect cover for them to have a secret conspiracy. And have you ever watched the footage of them supposedly reuniting on Jerry's telethon? Their interaction looked well-rehearsed, a little too slick. And who was on the stage with them? Sinatra. And we know about the trouble he ended up having with Jack Kennedy. So why not get Jerry and Dean, who are supposedly not together, to do a conspiracy for him? Yeah. (I nod my head and stroke the whiskers on my chin.)

• The way Chinese drivers interact at controlled intersections says a lot about Chinese culture. Every time, I have to make a left turn in one, or just go through one, it has been a bit of an adventure because Chinese drivers won't stick to their lanes, turning Chinese drivers won't yield to oncoming traffic, and Chinese drivers creep into traffic making other cars swerve around them. No Chinese driver seems willing to do what it takes to make the place orderly and civilized. Their assumption seems to be that one else is going to do the right thing either. This explains why I haven't seen many stop signs in China and definitely no four-way stop intersections. There have been a few situations where lights have stopped working at intersections and the result is a quick grid lock because no one is willing to yield. I say this apropos of some traffic changes I have recently seen in my area. The local authorities have tried to make road traffic more civilized by putting fencing on the center lines of many roads in my area. They did have openings in the fences so that drivers on side roads could make left turns onto the main road and driver on the main road could make left turns onto the side roads. But these resulting T-junctions became gridlocked and/or dangerous because of the local driver's inability to slow down or yield to other drivers; and so the authorities decided to put fences in the openings to stop left-turning drivers from causing accidents. (of course that doesn't stop the right-turning drivers who don't look both ways before turning from snarling up traffic but that's another story.)

• My son Tony & I went to the downtown of Wuxi (we live in the 'burbs about 10 KM away) to get haircuts. While the place wasn't completely locked down; it wasn't back to what it had been a few months before. It was very subdued. There weren't as many people walking about in Sanyang Plaza and it was quiet.

Things Tony Likes; Working from Home; Political Economy; Snow in Wuxi; Tiger King; Trump Wasn't Racist

• My son Tony likes Robot Chicken, the Home Alone movie, Malcolm X, Homicide Hunter Joe Kenda, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, The Leon character in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the Slapshot movie, playing a cricket app on his phone and ketchup bread. I'll explain three of these likes. First, I was watching a documentary about Malcom X which featured lots of footage of him speaking. Tony watched parts of the documentary and told me that he really liked him. Second, Tony likes his sports. Somehow, he came upon Cricket and asked me about it. One thing lead to another and I was downloading a Cricket app for him to play on my phone. Third, Tony is a very picky eater. He likes to eat pasta without sauce. He likes to eat bread with ketchup.

• A friend in Winnipeg, Canada tells me that he is working from home. Thinking of something silly that I could say in response, I thought to ask him if he was using his computer or shouting very loudly.

• I don't know what to make of the economics of what is going on now. I studied economics back in my school days and read a lot about it after graduating. At one point, I had the libertarian's certainty of free-market economics being able to explain everything; but after the crash of '08, I found nothing about what was going on in the world of trade and finance made any sense. So, I gave up that certainty and freely admitted my bafflement at was taking place.. I also became more reactionary in my political and metaphysical leanings, and I saw the moral failures of capitalism, and began to realize that big corporations are things that need to be contained as much as big governments. The problems with economics as a field of study are that it is not a science, but pretends to be one; and that it somehow became divorced from the study of politics and an awareness of power relations and how elites can rig markets. Other then to say that good economics is not good politics, there isn't much economics can tell us about what is happening today. The solution is to bring back the study of Political Economy. Why it got divorced into two fields: political study and economic science could probably say a lot about how it was we got into the state of affairs we find ourselves in now. Economic theory that does not take into account the power relationships between groups in an "economy" is useless. That is why the elimination of economic science and political science, and their amalgamation into political economy is an absolute necessity.

• Snow on a Saturday morning in Wuxi. This was after there had been days when the temperatures had been in the mid-twenties Celsius and Tony & I had been playing baseball.

• I finished watching the Netflix documentary Tiger King. A crazy story. A celebration of American Weird. No one in this documentary comes off well and yet you can't help but sympathize with the Joe Exotic character and loathe his nemesis Baskin.

• If Trump was being racist, he would have made a point of calling it the Asian Flu. He didn't. And to those who would say that saying you can't trust Chinese numbers is racist: No one is saying that you can't trust the numbers coming out of Japan or South Korea...

Anti-Racism: A Murderous Ideology; AAR = R?; Racism = Racialism?; Laugh at Differences; Lockdown Unwinding in Wuxi; Nice to Know Debates Can Take Place in Other Parts of the World

• Because of behavior of anti-racists during the virus crisis, I think that Anti-Racism should be classified a murderous ideology and its practitioners as enemies of humanity. With thoughtful and reasonable people, it should be thought of as being akin to other destructive ideologies like Communism, Nazism and Feminism. What started out as well-intentioned desire for people to judge other individuals by the content of their character and to be blind to superficialities like skin color has instead become a fanatical urge that certain people of certain skin colors and ethnicities be blind to the moral failings of others because they possess certain skin colors or come from certain ethnicities; and that we as well be blind to the frictions that cultural differences cause people in their everyday lives. I know that I am not the only one who thinks this and I pray that that better writers and thinkers than me would write a Anti-Anti-Racism Manifesto and a Black Book of Anti-Racism.

• Does being Anti-Anti-Racism mean I am for Racism? Depends on what your mean by Racism. Anti-Anti-Racism and Racism, whatever that actually is, are different things. AAR is strictly a protest against the murderous excesses of AR. AAR's view of R is complicated to explain. For one thing, R is difficult to define. There doesn't seem to be an agreed definition of what it is. Growing up, I thought R purely was a feeling of ill will towards people because they came from other races. But in fact, no "racist" actually hates people because of their skin color or ethnicity. They feel ill will towards people of other races because of the contents of their characters or their different cultural practices. Most "racists" would also despise bad behavior if it was done by members or their own "race." I also grew up thinking that R was an unalloyed bad irredeemable thing, and that there could never be a "good" racism or a "bad" racism. But since having turned more Catholic in my thinking, I became very aware of the fallen nature of man. Most men are not angels and even the saints among them had their flaws. For R to be strictly a bad thing, it would mean that all men are angels and saints and beyond reproach. That is not true for a moment. It is a logical impossibility. Men, bastards and fallen creatures that they are, all deserve to be subject to some sort of bigotry. Bigotry, even in its vilest form, is a form of criticism that should prompt us to examine ourselves truthfully. Is what they say about me true? What can I do to improve myself (ourselves)? Bad R is based on a lie. Good R is criticism that should be taken to heart. If R is strictly bad, that of course AAR will be against it.

• There is another definition of Racism which is that it is the belief that humans can be classified into races. I have heard that there are very sophisticated arguments to be made, using genetics, that could leave one convinced that there is no hard and fast race lines between humans. But then I have heard arguments that say there are. So it is a question of whether Race is a category of the mind or a category of nature. All I know is that living in China for sixteen years, the Chinese might as well be different animals from me. Their thoughts and ways of behavior are so different, as to be alien, from mine. The Chinese and I are certainly of different categories of the mind. Whether these differences can be overcome by each of us learning to change our manner of thinking or are just so much part of our natures so as not to be overcome is the question. My experience suggests they can't be overcome. This definition of Racism is not the one I grew up with. It seems that if this the current definition of Racism then a sleigh of hand has been played. Growing up thinking that Racism was an unalloyed bad, I had accepted the bad connotations of the word Racist unthinkingly. Of course, there was a word "Racialist" that had been used to cover that way of thinking. But now racialists are racist, it would seem.

• Anyway, as I think Chesterton said, differences are be laughed at. But what can be laughed at, can only be tolerated for a short duration and then it becomes problem.

• Slowly the state of lockdown is withering away. I have seen more and more locals walking around without masks. The local shopping mall has stopped doing the virus entrance procedures, and now all entrances to the mall are open and shoppers can freely enter.

• I am glad to read that there is a debate over whether the lockdowns taking place in other parts of the world are necessary.

My Mother-In-Law; A New Place to Play Catch; Anti-Anti-Racist; Funny Virus Thoughts; Lockdown Thoughts; Silly Thoughts

• The People's Republic of China has been a terrible in-law for the world this year, but my actual Chinese mother-in-law (Mama) is a great woman. She smokes, drinks and is a gentle sort. She reminds me of another gentle and indefatigable soul who I known in my life, and probably didn't deserve to: my Aunt Ritma. Ritma was a person who you could be around and never imagine her never getting angry. (Ritma, R.I.P.) Sadly, Mama has sight only in one eye. Recently, she had to have an operation on the eye which was basically for cosmetic purposes. The eye had degenerated to the point where she could use it again. 

• In the previous entry, I told you about the travails of playing pitch and catch with Tony. A certain incident at a basketball court caused me to look for another place to do this. Now, I do have some familiarity with the area around Casa K, and I decided to try this park which I recalled had a fairly big and level playing field. Tony was initially skeptical as I drove him to the park, but once we were there and found the field, he was pleased. We do have to play around people pulling kites and kicking football, but the park will do.

• Far now on, if someone goes on an anti-racism rant, I will ask them if they are in fact not racist themselves and why is it that they think they aren't. I would then maybe ask them to define what they mean by racism, whether racist people are lying or are just mistaken, whether anyone can be racist (not just southern white people or people who would vote Republican.), and why racism is such a big problem.

• Funny thoughts I have heard about the virus. 1) Call it the Xi-ingles. 2) The virus hasn't killed as many people as Chairman Mao, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Adolf Hitler.

• I have read all sorts of thoughts about the lockdown currently taking place in North America and Europe. I have heard compelling arguments that say the lockdown is necessary and equally compelling arguments that say that it is a over-reaction. I do strongly agree, on one point, with those stating that it is an over-reaction in that some unfortunate and near evil precedents have been set vis-a-vis government control resulting in citizens having to be subjected to stupid procedures. The ridiculous security procedures at Airports are an example of what I am talking about.

• For some inexplicable reason, I decided to publish WeChat moments where I posted photos of famous or notable public figures, and changed the "son" in their family names to stone. So I posted moments for Johnny Carstone, Jackie Gleastone, Howard Johnstone, Dwayne Johnstone, Lyndon B. Johnstone, Charles Manstone, OJ Simpstone, Chris Watstone, and Daniel Johnstone. The last two people on my list were an Australian PM and a Quebec Premier, respectively. (I suppose I am a big fan of common names being slightly mispronounced. Nothing, for example, gives me a bigger tingle up my leg than a certain way of pronouncing Los Angeles: Los Angelees.)

Now I Wonder How Others Are Doing; Disinformation; Playing Catch with Tony; The State of the Casa Kaulins Apartment Complex Basketball Court; Ides of March Meme; More People at the Basketball Court; Peeing on the Basketball Court;

• Funny, the virus crisis started out with me sending messages to people in North America to say I was doing okay; now, I am asking people in North America how they are doing. My mother tells me that they are panicking in Brandon, Manitoba of all places. Brandon is two hundred kilometres from a city that has an airport that doesn't have many international connections. To get to Brandon, you must drive, and if you don't have a reason to visit it, you don't. And yet the residents are panicking. Schools in Brandon are closing for three weeks.

• So much disinformation is getting out there about what Trump and the USA are doing about the virus that I have to tune out. The TDS sufferers would say that Trump was doing a bad job of it. So, whether he is or not is hard to say.

• My son Tony & I have been playing catch every day just about. We are playing on our apartment complex's basketball court. We can play baseball on a basketball court, unfortunately, because the hoop at one end of the court now has no backboard which makes it near useless to shoot at. We do have to work around kids who are riding bikes and the occasional persons shooting at the bad basket because they can't shot at the other hoop and they are tired of waiting for a break in the near constant pick-up game being played, by the same group of people every day, at the good hoop. And this good hoop now seems to be bent. Anyway, Tony is getting more confident at throwing at catching the baseball. We have even been doing a bit of batting. Tony is still hopeless at fungoing the ball, but he can present a good stance when I am lobbing pitches at him to try to hit.

• The basketball court is a microcosm of what is wrong and right about Chinese civilisation. 1)The state of disrepair of the basketball court is annoying. I have been asking for a year at least why the backboard on the bad hoop hasn't been repaired. My wife has told me that there is no money. Western civilisation, in its heyday, wouldn't have allowed this to stand. Someone would have done something about it and maybe have put the onus on his self to fix the hoop. In China, it seems that everyone accepts it. 2)The fact that the same people everyday are playing a pick up game and keeping the same other people everyday from playing points out another flaw of the locals. Their absolute selfishness in public. And these selfish types are the adults. Western civilisation, in its hey day (I don't know now anymore) would have seen the adults making arrangements so that everyone could get a good proportion of playing time. (Of course, the other hoop actually being repaired by an adult would have solved the problem in the first place. But one character flaw brings out others.) 3)The basketball court area is very dirty. I have had to retrieve a mis-thrown or not-caught baseball many a time in my playing catch with Tony and so have had a good close-up look at bushes and the ground around the basketball court. The adage that one shouldn't look at China close-up (at least than ten meters) is so true. The locals shamelessly litter and let their pets shit everywhere.

• To mark the Ides of March and the assassination of Caesar, I created a meme with a picture of a man wearing a tin foil hat and had the meme say: "There was a conspiracy to kill to Caesar. Just not the one they would have you believe." I sent it to a friend who replied: "Very funny. Two Sid references." I was momentarily befuddled as to what he was talking about. I then realised that the one Sid reference he made was to the meme. He took the "one" in it to refer to "Caesar" – I had meant the "one" to refer to "conspiracy." Stupidly, I hadn't realised the dangling modification error I had made in the meme. The meme should have said: There was a conspiracy to kill Caesar. Just not the conspiracy that they would have you believe." and/or "There was a conspiracy to kill Caesar. Just not the Caesar that they would have you believe." The second Sid reference was a mistake on my friend's part that I figured out. I had earlier sent him a Keith Richards meme that said if the China Virus killed Keith that it would kill us all. He thought Keith was Sid Vicious.

• One day, to pick up packages, I drove, instead of walking, to Jenny's office building. On the way, I saw, ahead of me, that the police had pulled over a truck. I also saw an e-biker trying to pass the truck get stopped by a policeman. The e-biker, a man, either didn't want to be stopped or didn't understand what the policeman wanted. I was passing the truck when this happened. Then, in my rearview mirror, I saw the policeman run and grab onto the e-biker to get him to stop. It looked like another cop came to assist... This is not the first time I have seen this sort of thing happen. Many locals will try to race through police roadblocks.

• {Later} More and more people are showing up at that basketball court area where Tony & I have been playing catch and where I have have lobbing balls at Tony to hit. The people showing up are little children and their handlers. It is annoying for Tony & I because they frequently walk in the path of our ball exchanges. But there is nothing we can do about it. We have to be patient because we very much don't need to hit someone, especially a little child, with a ball. Still, it is hard to stay patient because these people who we are now seeing are exhibiting the stereotypical Chinese lack of self-awareness, Chinese lack of consideration for others, and Chinese lack of basic hygiene. Two days in a row I saw that someone was hanging their laundry in the basketball court area. We also saw one grandmother let their child take a pee on the basketball court surface. (Seeing the latter thing, which happened right after Tony had made his best hit of a ball I had lobbed to him, so disgusted me & Tony that we decided to just go back to Casa Kaulins.)

• The grandmother letting her child pee on the basketball court makes me think that the most likely cause of the virus was lack of hygiene in Wuhan coupled with a stupid attempt by the Chicoms to suppress news about it. The story of it being a bio-chemical weapon seems far-fetched to me. But the point is that Trump is right to call it the Chinese virus.

The Four Cardinal Virtues; Big Dummy; My Lent So Far; Narco-nomics; Tony the Loner; Getting McDonald's; Parking Lot Hell;

• I am reading this book about the Four Cardinal Virtues authored by Josef Pieper. The highest on the hierachy of the four is Prudence, followed by Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. I would assume, and what I could gather from Pieper, that Prudence allows us to do the proper thing, without overdoing it for the other three. 

• I did a very imprudent thing. It all started, innocently enough, on a Saturday morning. I was up and going through my morning routine, in a relaxed fashion, when my wife Jenny asked me to pick up a delivery for her. This meant I had to get dressed, get in the car and drive to her office tbuilding o get the packages. I had been stopping on the main road in front of the building, putting on my four-ways and rushing into the building. But because I had been picking up so many parcels at one time and taking a lot of time, I was getting worried about getting a ticket. So, what I have been doing now is parking in a lot that is down the street from Jenny's office building. If I get done fast enough, I don't have to pay for parking. The only problem with this lot is that it is always nearly full and parking is tight because the locals, parking as they do, will often park their cars where I wouldn't dare. So, I drove to the office, parked the family car at the lot and walked to the building. I picked up the parcels and returned to the car. To my consternation, an armored car had parked in front of my car and looked like it was going to be stopped for a while. I immediately got into I-hate-the-local-drivers mode. I loaded the packages into the car, sat in the driver's seat when the armored car driver noticed me. I gave him a stare. He shrugged his shoulders. I should have left it at that and waited, but being in the prickly mood I was in, I gave the driver the middle finger salute. He put his shoulders back in response, and got very annoyed at me. And then the guards, with submachine guns, walked up to me, and one asked if I spoke English. The mood I was in then was strange. I felt a weird exhilaration combined with immediate remorse at my imprudence. I felt like laughing and was shrugging my shoulders while feeling self-defensive. I said something about them having seen them and thus they shouldn't have blocked me. The armored car driver backed up to let me out. I said thank you, and then sorry, and I hand-punched one of the armed guards. I drove off and was shaken by the incident the rest of the morning. (Further, reading Pieper's book, I saw that my action was also intemperate.)

• I haven't been very good with Lent either. I have been doing readings but not doing any sort of penance.

• I watched season two of the Netflix series Narcos Mexico. It prompted me to look for more books and documentaries about Narcos. I found this book entitled Narco-nomics, written from an economist's perspective. The book was informative, but the author's being a proponent for the legalization of drugs left me cold. He didn't factor in the health effects and the destruction of society caused by drugs when making his case. While he was correct in saying that the drug problem is a demand problem, he should have also taken into account that it was a moral and institutional problem. People should not be taking drugs and the institutions of a moral society should be doing everything in their power to get people to realize how stupid taking recreational drugs is. And as Peter Hitchens has been saying over and over again, the institutions of his country and other western countries have not really seriously seen drugs as a moral problem and haven't really fought the drug war seriously.

• My son Tony doesn't have any friends. (Like father, like son.) That doesn't seem to be a problem for him. I have never ever heard him complain about being lonely. He spends his spare time on computers and the smart phone. He is happy to play games and watch his favorite shows. He doesn't seem to need other people. When I ask him if he misses his teachers, he tells me he doesn't. When I ask him if he misses his classmates, he says the same. (I should mention that Tony is taking classes online. It's my job to get him up in the morning, and set up the Apple TV so he can watch them.)

• On a Sunday, I drove Tony to downtown Wuxi for a drumming class. After this, we drove to a Carrefour to do a bit of shopping. I was hoping to buy some particular brand of cheese and butter, but had no luck. We did get a six pack of Corona Beer, some drinks for Tony, some bacon and two packages of spreadable cream cheese. We went to pay for the stuff and immediately saw lineups of at least ten carts at every register, whether manned or self-checkout. I am not sure how many minutes we waited, but I was able to pass the time by praying the rosary. We then returned to the Hui Shan district with a plan to go to the Wanda Plaza and buy some McDonald's, but there was a very long lineup of cars trying to get into the parking garage and so we decided to go home. The lineup was due to it being Sunday and the virus security procedures. I ended up walking to the mall from Casa K to get McDonald's and pick some up delivery packages for Jenny at her office building. I came upon another long lineup, this time of pedestrians waiting to enter into the Mall, being held up by virus security procedures. I was tempted to again not bother going to McDonald's but I resisted. Tony was awfully hungry at this point. At the McD's, customers were not allowed to enter the restaurant, but to order and pickup food at the entrance. There was a QR code on a table to allow customers to make orders on a app, but I got a girl to give me a menu. She took my order and then took my phone inside so I could pay via Alipay. I got the food and then walked to Jenny's office building to pick up a bunch of delivery packages. From there, I walked back to Casa K with my hands fully loaded.

• I hate to return to the scene of my crimes, but during the Virus Crisis, I have no choice but to go back to that parking lot because my wife Jenny is always ordering things that have to be picked up at her office building. Monday afternoon, I did the mule thing and drove to the parking lot. It was as crowded as I had ever seen it. The parking spots which were perpendicular to the lot's roadway were all taken; the spots where local drivers will parallel park (but a westerner wouldn't) were all taken; and one side of the lot's roadway, cars were parallelparked, and thus double parked, in front of perpendicularly parked cars. (I wonder if some kind of coordination between drivers was necessary for so many cars to be blatantly parallel parked as they were, but in China, you can never know for sure. I have seen a lot of very inconsiderate parking here.) I drove through the lot roadway, which was then a narrow gauntlet, and didn't bother trying to park as I didn't want to risk losing my temper again. So, I drove to the underground lot of Jenny's office complex, (which required going through security) parked at the end of the garage that was close to the entrance of her office building, ran past the parking lot attendant booths, and then ran up a ramp to get to street level and to the entrance to Jenny's office building. Before going up the ramp, I did try to find some secret way to get to where the parcel lockers were, but one elevator I found lead to the back of some business and not to a corridor containing package lockers. I also saw a lot of padlocked doors including the doorway leading to the package lockers from the parking garage. (That door was never locked before the Virus Crisis). I did pick up the four parcels Jenny had been expecting, and proceeded to return to my parked vehicle. As I did so, I worried that someone would stop me from going down into the parking garage, but I had no problems, and a security guy, who I thought would have stopped me, did nothing. I loaded the packages in the car and drove back to Casa K.

Idea #1; Idea#2; Jenny Loses It; What Should I do?; Do Chinese Women Understand the Concept of Cultural Differences?; Talking Politics with Jenny; Talking Politics with anti-Trumpers;

• Citizen: Hello handsome officer! I think I have an illegal firearm on my person! I will have to be searched. Police Officer: Okay! Just let me finish eating my donut!

• I made a cops and robber video with Tony. Tony wore a balaclava; I had a donut in my hand.

• As I have been saying (blogging), I love being a homebody, during this virus crisis, but I am always on eggshells because of my wife Jenny's bad temper. After nearly 14 years of marriage, I know some ways in which to placate her and thus not trigger her; but there are times when I can feel the storm coming on and feel absolutely helpless. (Two ways to see the storm coming: 1) Jenny scowling 2) Tony scowling). What really gets Jenny off is Tony's schooling. She can scream at Tony for two or three or four hours on end while tutoring him. One afternoon, I went out of the apartment to get some things and came back. Jenny was in the kitchen preparing supper; Tony was in his room at his desk. I could tell from Tony's manner that Jenny had been reaming him out while I had been out. And it got worse. At a certain point, Jenny was so enraged by Tony not being able to solve some problem, that she suspended making supper, sat beside him at his desk, and then went to find a ping-pong paddle. She slapped him with it fourteen times, hissed at him in Chinese, and called him a "fucking idiot!". She would have broken a laptop of mine and have went after him with a baseball bat if I hadn't stopped her. While I was doing this, she said that Tony & I were both losers, to which I replied that she was the loser, we weren't the ones who couldn't control our tempers.

• What can I do about this? I first have to try to understand what is causing her temper tantrums Am I the cause? Yes, of course: but this is because I am near her and I am a human with flaws. I have seen my wife have violent disagreements with strangers in public. I have even seen her not talk to her parents for a year or so because she got mad at them about something. Is it because she's a woman? Partially, she has a woman's viciousness to other women that I don't have to other men, and there are a lot of men I know that I don't like. She is illogical. She is incapable of arguing without using ad hominem arguments. (Men do do this until the logical error is pointed out to them. Jenny just insults me more when I try to point this logical error out to her.) The idea of arguing about something in good will is something that I don't think would occur to her. Is it because she's Chinese? She has told me that she loses her temper because of pressure that she is getting from Chinese society. She always says Tony doing poorly in school causes her, in her words, "to feel shame" (lose face!). I know that many other local parents have a similar approach to their child's education, and when I point out the nuttiness of their approach to them, they say they have to because everyone else does it, and it is for their future (stupid argument) anyway. Is it because she is, in fact, crazy? Crazy as it may seem, to me and many other western parents, to bring out a baseball bat because a child is having trouble with some math problem, this is part of Chinese culture. I have heard of Western parents going nutty like this but having remorse after; and apparently some Chinese parents have remorse after doing such things, but I have never heard Jenny express remorse but instead say that I am not helping her and so that it is really my fault that she is beating Tony. So. What can I do about this? I am still not sure if I am stuck in a situation that would be universally considered poisonous or if the cultural differences between Jenny & I are so wide as to be insurmountable. (It would seem to me that I would have to turn off my critical faculties and half my brain before I could ever become a Chinese parent.) All I can do now is gently encourage Tony and be patient with him, and hopefully Tony can do well and thus show Jenny that there is a more humane approach.

• I have had many male expats, married to Chinese women, complain that their wives have trouble grasping there are such things as cultural differences. So often with Jenny, when trying to get this message across to her, I have ended up exasperatingly telling her that I am not Chinese, and what she is thinking does make sense to me and accepting it would require me to ignore glaring contradictions and illogicalities.

• I don't bother talking politics with Jenny. One time we talked about Trump and she didn't like it when I told her that I didn't hate him. Sometimes, I have seen her taking the Chicom line on some issue of the day. It would seem that having been told what to think, she doesn't care what I think, or want to hear counter-arguments.

• There is a Canadian I know in Wuxi who has a Chinese wife, and they have a daughter, a little bit younger than Tony. We talk about life in Wuxi and dealing with our Chinese wives (I have warned him of the hell to come when his daughter gets into primary school). However, he doesn't like Trump and it seems that his hatred of the president is very visceral. So, I don't bother talking politics with him unless he brings it up. Recently, he told me about Trump doing things at a press conference about the coronavirus that were bad, and Rush Limbaugh saying that the virus was a hoax. As I suspected, when looking into it, it was the left-wing media lying and taking things out of context. I have noticed that every anti-Trumper I know has to tell you about their hatred, and when they find you disagree with it, they aren't at all curious as to why you don't share their hatreds. (If asked why I never got along with a person, politically: we didn't hate the same things.)