Ann Coulter’s not in Kansas anymore. In fact, she is not even on the planet earth, but rather in her own bizarre and depraved universe.

Check out a great new post from Orcinus on how Ann’s religious mission to redeem Joe McCarthy defies sanity and constitutes revisionism at its most dangerous.

The first half of today was so awful, so thoroughly depressing that for a moment I wondered why I should bother living. And I have to be mighty depressed to think that way.

I have been trying to send money to my love in America to pay the mortgage, and the Internet transaction seems to have vaporised in the ether. No one seems to be able to explain where the money went; all I know is it was taken out of my account. A health insurance company owes me more than $2000 for my medical bills in Beijing following my fall, and that, too, seems to be lost in some bureaucratic maze, and I feel like K in Kafka’s The Trial, absolutely unable to get any information or answers. I felt desperate.

A whole wave of headaches like this came crashing down all at once, and I left the office for lunch feeling utterly helpless and overwhelmed. I was shaking, I felt so frustrated.

As I staggered back to the office, I was counting all the reasons why life just wasn’t worth it. What’s the point? It’s so easy just to end it. And then….

I opened my email, and there was one of those moments that belonged in a Hollywood movie. My eyes saw the Subject of the email, and as my brain processed the letters, I suddenly heard Louis Armstrong’s gravelly voice in the background singing, “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world….”

The header simply said something along the lines of, “I may have a job for your friend Ben.” (Ben is my dearest friend from Beijing, someone whom I treasure, the one to whom I “pushed the envelope.”)

It was a very simple email, extraordinarily kind and gracious, from a reader who has an ad agency in China. Maybe nothing will come of it. It was just that it came at that moment when everything seemed totally black, and it filled my world with a beautiful light, and I felt all the fears and sadness of the earlier hours melt away. As I read the content, tears welled in my eyes, and I finally just rested my head in my arms and cried silently.

The writer had read my posts about Ben and his difficulties landing a job in Beijing, and he was simply saying that maybe, possibly, he might have something to offer. Maybe not, but why not see?

I do not want that person to feel that now I expect anything to come of it. Just as when I brought Ben to my own company back in Beijing for an interview, I was determined that Ben would succeed based on his own abilities, and not on my lobbying. I have since helped Ben find a couple of other job leads, but, to be fair, I divorce myself from the process after the introductions.

So it may not amount to anything, but it reminded me that there is still a lot of goodness on the planet. I picked up the phone and called my health insurance company, and for the first time in months, I actually made progress, and got a commitment from a real person. Suddenly, the world was just…different.

The day also drove home to me just how badly I want to go home after my two and-a-half-years away. I owe it to my company to stay for now, and I am giving them everything I’ve got — after all, they got me out of China. But it’s definitely the last stop on the way back to my family and my cats and my home.

Ages ago I wrote about the near-obsessive care Chinese people take to avoid “bad-luck numbers” like 4 and 14.

Then there are the good-luck numbers, most prominently the number 8, which in Chinese is “ba” which sounds like “fa” which means “to prosper.”

All of this is background to a tiny anecdote, namely that Sichhuan Airline a few days ago bought the telephone number 8888-8888 for $288,000 USD, which is about 2.33 million yuan. It’s going to be their customer service number. It illustrates just how powerful these superstitions can be.

Superstitions and feng shui and luck play an amazingly important role for millions of Chinese, even here in Singapore. One of my clients told me we had to delay the launch of his new company because the third week of August had bad feng shui (something to do with the Hungry Ghost Festival, I think) and the second week of September was the earliest he could do it. This is a computer geek in his 20s, not an old villager. Some traditions just linger on….

Update: In case you skip the comments, a reader referred me to this informative article on the magic of 8. Thanks, commenter.

An unwittingly self-parodying article just came out in People’s Daily in which half the phrases are put in “quotation marks” to indicate the author’s (i.e., the government’s) scoffing at the idea that there is any semblance of legitimacy to Taiwan’s “presidential elections.” Unintentionally funny. Vintage CCP.

UPDATE: Link corrected

Now this is really surprising:

BANGKOK – Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of the late opera composer Richard Wagner, will lead a delegation to Thailand in November to attend the opening ceremony of the Thai branch of the International Wagner Society, the first such group in Southeast Asia, a new report said Friday.

They’ll actually be performing Das Rheingold in Bangkok in 2005, with the rest of the Ring to follow.

I was involved in an effort to start a Wagner Society in Beijing back in April, but unfortunately I had to depart before it really got going. Does Singapore have a Wagner Society? Hmmm.

Far-right talk radio psychopath Michael Savage can again be heard on NYC’s airwaves (he was fired from WABC radio earlier for his foul-mouthed racism). Mayor Bloomberg is recommending that New Yorkers clean their ears thoroughly with antibacterial soap after listening to the new program.

Sad article on the difficulties today’s college grads are having finding jobs in China.

This is a subject close to my heart. My best friend in China, Ben, is having a terrible time finding a job, and I keep telling him that the competition is more intense now than it’s ever been in his lifetime, and he should not blame himself for rejections. It’s just the way it is for nearly every Chinese job hunter at the moment.

I wonder if there is any place in Asia where jobs are easy to come by. HK and Singapore have been steeped in unemployment for a couple of years now. The difference with China is that at least in HK and Spore the students have known for a long time just how hard-to-impossible finding their dream job would be. In China, it is apparently coming as a shock, and a lot of young people are realizing sadly that they must rearrange their plans and dreams. At the moment, there’s no end in sight.

Adam over at PRC News tells us (toward the end of the post) “…China has just begun accepting people with AIDS as regular people. Very telling.”

Very telling indeed. Tell it to the villagers referred to in the post below — the ones whose skulls were cracked open by the increasingly tolerant and magnanimoius CCP and its hired thugs.

I guess nothing can shock me about China anymore, particularly in regard to its psychotic approach to AIDS. As Conrad once posted, the government first infected its populace (via contaminated blood and no controls), then blamed them, then beat them to a pulp, literally.

The latest article from the WaPo shows just how depraved conditions in China truly are, and I choose the adjective carefully.

Here are the opening paragraphs, but read it all; it only gets worse:

XIONGQIAO, China — Xiong Jinglun was lying in bed on the night of the raid, resting his frail, AIDS-weakened body when the shouting outside jarred him awake. The 51-year-old farmer struggled to his feet and shuffled out of his shack to investigate, but someone had cut off the electricity in the village, and it was difficult to see in the pitch dark.

Suddenly, several men wearing riot gear and military fatigues surrounded him, struck his head with a nightstick and knocked him to the ground, he recalled. Xiong begged them to stop hitting him, crying out that he was an old man, that he had AIDS. But he heard one of the assailants shout: “Beat them! Beat them even if they have AIDS!”

A few days earlier, residents of this AIDS-stricken Chinese village had staged a protest demanding better medical care, rolling two government vehicles into a ditch to vent their frustration. Now, local authorities here in central Henan province, about 425 miles northwest of Shanghai, were answering their appeal for help. But instead of doctors, they sent the police.

More than 500 officers, local officials and hired thugs stormed the muddy hamlet of 600 residents on the night of June 21, shouting threats, smashing windows and randomly pummeling people who got in their way, witnesses said. Police jailed 18 villagers and injured more than a dozen others, including an 8-year-old boy who tried to defend his sick mother.

I really savor the posts I read now and then from idealistic dilettantes (something I can be at times myself) who defend the CCP at any cost, no matter what they do. I’d love to hear them defend this. Of course, they’ll say as usual that it is isolated and atypical and they “need more information” before they can comment.

The key to understanding the depravity of the CCP on the AIDS scandal comes mid-way down:

The leadership is reluctant to allow an open discussion about AIDS in part because it fears it would be blamed for the epidemic. Hundreds of thousands of poor farmers like Xiong contracted the virus by selling blood in the early 1990s at state hospitals and private clinics run by local officials and their friends. These programs often used unsanitary collection methods, including a process in which blood was mixed in a centrifuge to remove plasma and then reinjected into donors

Can everyone get that? Can the defenders of the CCP process this? Can anyone at all find a reason to defend what is happening?

I want the non-believers to visualize what happened, to see themselves protesting a gross injustice from the government, and for that being beaten and arrested and treated like animals — all because that very same government helped them contract AIDS.

After several days without a response, five villagers went to the provincial capital, Zhengzhou. But officials there would not see them and instead contacted local authorities, who had the men arrested. Police beat them, tied them up and hauled them back to a local jail, said Xiong Changmin, 31, one of the representatives.

That night, police launched the raid on Xiongqiao. A senior county police official, who asked to be identified only by his surname, Jia, confirmed that about 500 men participated in the raid and that they arrested 13 villagers. He said those detained had attacked a local official. But asked whether his men beat up people in Xiongqiao, he replied, “I’m not clear about that.”

I have referred to China as “the other Evil Empire,” and I stick to it. If we are imposing trade sanctions against Cuba, we should be doing 10 times more when it comes to China. Two years ago I was the government’s biggest sympathizer, and now I am and always will be a very harsh critic. Those of you who remain dazzled by the pyrotechnic display of China’s miraculous growth and prosperity, be forewarned — when the foundation is rotten, the collapse of the entire structure is inevitable. Just pray you’re not around when that day comes.

The Singapore headlines are a bit more intense than usual today:

Singaporeans’ miss the smiles of the late Iranian Siamese twins

Lee Kuan Yew’s son is being groomed to be the next Prime Minister (no surprise there)

The Singapore junior college debate team won great scores

Some mobile customers are unhappy with their phone numbers

Parents should choose primary schools close to their homes

And that’s the way it is here in Singapore, where it sometimes gets so deathly dull that even the little flies on the wall tuck in their wings and go to sleep. I think I’ll go home and watch some paint dry.