Tiananmen Square Murders

 36 years ago today

https://youtu.be/yM9eOjreIWU?si=xoXkhYAnVNrC6Wev

Grieving and Living

We moved back to Texas from Guam in 2019 because my parents were old, sick, and frail. We needed to be closer than three plane rides and 21 hours away. My mother passed on January 2, 2025. She and my father had been married for almost 66 years.  Since then, we've seen them probably twice a year. However, as we live in Houston and they were in Lubbock, it was a ten-hour drive, so we didn't go that often. 

I called my father yesterday. He was visiting my mother's grave. He was almost weeping as he said how much he missed her.  I'm glad I called. It gave him someone to talk to, and he needed that. My wife and I have been married for 39 years. I can at least vicariously understand his grief. I know how much I would miss Kim if she were gone. Like I said, I'm glad I called, but I didn't know what to say. I just listened.

The Trojan War

I watched a documentary on the Illiad and Oddesey today. Sometimes I think academics overthink things. They gassed on and on about how the Trojan War if it happened at all (which they were not sure was the case), was really about trade, commerce, and economics despite the fact that wars are almost never fought over those things. Most wars are actually, or so it appears to me, fought over ideology though sometimes economic issues are involved.

When I read the old tales like this I come to a different conclusion than the professors of ancient history and anthropology interviewed for the documentary. Most of these ancient kings would, I think fit right in with what might be called a Red-Neck culture and that means their motivations were not the same as Harvard/Oxford-educated eggheads.

Those ancient kings hunted, fished, worked on their farms, and as the Greeks invented wrestling watched 'rasslin' in their spare time. 

They let the dogs in the dining room at dinner time and fed them scraps while the meal was in progress.

 They hung their weapons on the living room wall so everyone could see their newest assault-style spear, sword, or bow.

They raced their horses and chariots. 

Gambling was a favorite pastime. 

They drank beer and wine by the gallon (Harder stuff hadn't been invented yet). 

They used mildly hallucinogenic plants like mandrake on a regular basis. 

They probably scratched,  belched, and told fart jokes. 

I doubt they took showers or baths more than once a month or so.

They worked with their hands. 

They camped out. 

They'd get together to watch sports, sing songs, or play games.

They ate the ancient equivalent of BBQ several times a week, and most meals included bread and cheese.

They were all veterans who showed off their scars and weren't afraid of a fight.

They were also loyal to their friends. They knew what they wanted and worked at getting it. These brutes worshiped their gods with sincerity. 

They loved their wives and children. 

They valued honesty and expected to be treated with respect by both friends and enemies.

If the description above doesn't describe a bunch of Red-Necks I don't know what does. This doesn't make the old kings perfect by any means but I just think these men were not as sophisticated and refined as academic hotten-tots try and make them out to be.

I think if old Menelaus had come home from a hard day hunting deer and fishing for crappie and bass (or whatever fish there are in Greece) and found out his wife had run off with some Trojan Yankee (Troy was North of where he lived after all) he'd have immediately called his best friends Aggie, Oddie and Lee (Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Achilles) and said "We gotta go bring Helen back! That fool must have kidnapped her because they ain't no way in Hell my wife'd run off with an SOB that stupid and ugly."

And that ladies and gentlemen, was the cause of the Trojan war.

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger who watches nerdy history documentaries

Fraught and Broken

Isn't it sad how often the people we should love the most are the ones hardest to love?

Sometimes this is due to the secular proverb, "Familiarity breeds contempt," but not always.

Sometimes families have real issues that they need to work out, othertimes there is a miscommunication. Still other times there are irreconcilable differences between children and parents. In such instances there may be blame on both sides. But, in my experience, one side is usually much more right, and the other nearly completely wrong. It is amazing how the idea of situational ethics and morality so quickly falls apart in the cruicble of existence.

This is where virtues cease to be platitudes and become active agents. It takes humility to admitt you're wrong. It takes patience to hold your tonge. It takes circumspection to see both sides. It takes bravery to confront hard issues. It takes fortitude to not give up. It takes wisdom to sometimes just let things be. It takes grace to accept an apology. It takes love to forgive.

Until Next time
Fai Mao

The Twilight Zone

My favorite TV show as a child before Star Trek came along

https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/the-twilight-zone-finale-60-year-anniversary

My five rules of "Reciprocal Ethics"

1. I don't comment on the sartorial choices people make. That gives me the right to demand that they don't disparage how I dress.
2. I don't tell people how to raise their poorly behaved, undisciplined, soon-to-be career criminal children. That gives me the right to demand that they don't complain about how I raised my kids.
3. I don't tell you how to run your crappy little country or state. That gives me the right to demand that you don't comment on mine
4. I don't make unsolicited comments about your weird, fat, criminal, tattooed-like-a-freak, or ugly spouse (Significant other). So I can demand you don't complain about my wife.
5. I don't complain about your culinary proclivities. So don't complain about mine.

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger resembling a grumpy old man

On Nightmares

I've had vivid nightmares and anxiety dreams since I was a child.

The first one I can remember was being chased by a fossilized dinosaur and watching it attempt to eat cars driving down the street. (Note this was a good 30+ years before Jurassic Park movies) It was scary enough that I can still remember the dream to this day, over 55 years later. While the description is comical, it wasn't funny when I was 7 years old.

Most of the time, the dreams were during stressful times, but not always.

What is also strange to me is that often the dreams recur multiple times over multiple nights, weeks, or even years. Some of the common dreams have been standing on a pole or pillar that is thousands of feet high, with no way down. I've had dreams where shadowy ghosts or spirits talked to me and left me wide awake and trembling. Once I dreamed that there was a man with an ax standing over me, about to chop me in two. This one ended with me standing up in bed, punching the ceiling, and yelling “No!”.

One less scary but frustrating dream that was repeated probably 7 to 10 times, had me driving a car, normally with another passenger. In the dream, we are driving to a city, but must avoid a different city at all cost. The cities have changed over time, but let us call them Houston and San Antonio. I keep taking the splits or exits for Houston, but as I do, I get further from Houston and closer to San Antonio. I think I wake up in the middle of this one. I don't really remember how it ends.

Several times, I've dreamed of having to cross a swamp full of monsters, snakes, or alligators to get to an MTR station in Hong Kong. If you've ever been to Hong Kong, you'll understand how strange and borderline funny that is.

One particularly frightening nightmare occurred several times. It is a lucid dream; I knew I was dreaming. In the dream, I wake up and someone is standing beside my bed, just at the edge of my sight. As I turn to see who it is, they back up. So no matter how far, or how fast I turn, I can never see who is there. I just keep turning until I yell, “Enough!” and truly wake up.

I had a new dream last week. A strange one.

In the dream, I was living in a dark and scary place with almost no light. Everything was in shades of grey. I thought of getting a dog, but it was too big and more frightening than whatever I was scared of. So I decided to just leave. As is common in dreams, there was no transition; I went from standing in a yard to standing on the sidewalk of a wide city street. I could see the shape of non-functioning traffic lights when I looked up the street. But everything was deserted. For some reason, I had to push a dumpster or skip across the street to check for invisible cars. Then I was across the street and entered another house. There was a man in the house who gave me a guitar and asked me to play a song. He was the first person or thing in color in the dream. I haven't really played a guitar in decades, but I took the guitar and started to play. As I did, the dream changed perspective. I saw the dark city from a bird's-eye view. My house, where I was, was the only point of light in the dark city. The overarching theme of the dream was loneliness.

This dream has haunted my thoughts for a week.

I don't place any psychic or prophetic importance on my dreams. I am not a pharaoh who needs Joseph to interpret my dreams. If standing on a pillar in a dream is just a dream, then this one was too. And yet, I am not an irreligious man.

The prophet Joel wrote;

“And afterward,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your old men will dream dreams,
    your young men will see visions.”

All I can say is that if the dreams of an old man are so intense, then I don't want to know the young man's visions.

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger who dreams the dreams of an old man

Hearing Aids

About 1 year ago I got hearing aids. It took a few months to get used to them and overall I really like them. But being able to hear got me thinking about the philosophical aspects of hearing.

Scientists who study such things tell us that senses like sight and hearing are adaptations that allow us to hunt for food or mates or avoid being hunted for food or mates. I guess that's true, though I wonder how a little organism that has neither the ability to hear nor see could even realize that light and sound existed?  

But anyway, I enjoy not having to continually say, "I'm sorry. Can you repeat that?" The hearing aids work with my phone so the phone call is piped directly into my ears. So unlike way too many Yahoos, I don't yell into my cell phone because I can hear what's being said on the other end. I can also listen to radio stations via the phone which is nice if I want to hear something in a crowded room and don't want to bother other people.  Lastly, the warning beeps and chimes in the car now play directly into the ear as well as out loud 

All of this leads me to ask two questions.

1. How much of the world do I actually want to hear?

2. How much of What I hear is actually worth listening to?

Do I really want to hear the world around me? Often time the answer is no. 

And, much of what I hear is worthless.

It makes me question the need for hearing aids/

Until Next Time

Fai Mao

The Blogger who isn't sure if liked being deaf better

 From my FaceBook page

On Collecting Quotes

On FaceBook, the only thing I post that gets even 1/3 the likes as pictures of my really smart, still looks like she’s 35 years old, loving and gracious wife, are quotes. I can understand why people like to see photos of Kim, especially those in my extended family who may have never met her. The likes for quotes were harder for me to understand.

It was, I think, the American philosopher Richard Rorty who said, “90% of everything philosophers say is wrong. But, the 10% they get right explains 90% of everything.” Quotes are like the philosopher's 10%. They distill the essence of an idea down into a pithy, insightful, humorous, or provocative statement condensing a whole book’s worth of wisdom into a sentence or two.

For a long time, I didn’t realize that you could collect quotes like people collect silver spoons or stamps but you can, and evidently, I have. I didn’t think of myself as a collector of pithy sayings until recently. I sort of approached my list of quotes like the actor Edward G. Robinson did cigars when he quipped, “I didn't play at collecting. No cigar anywhere was safe from me.” Quotes were things I used like he smoked cigars. They were references for research papers and the dissertation. They were tools to advance a career.

And yet, I have a word-processing file that is several pages long with just quotes. In fact, I’ve had several such lists over the years, and a couple of them have gotten lost. I don’t know the number of insightful quotes, limericks, or oneliners I’ve tried to keep. Many were made by people who are unknown to me; I have no idea who they are or were. I have some favorites but others I just found.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past several days.

Why do I collect quotes? I can't really say. However, I think that if, "joy is," as C.S. Lewis wrote, "the serious business of heaven," then quotes are the everyday business of wisdom. Look at Western Philosophy. It starts with Aesop and his fables. Notice how most of those fables end with a pithy saying or proverb. Something easy to remember and that cuts to the heart of the moral issue being presented. That's what good quotes do.

David Furnish said, “A good art collection is emblematic of the people collecting it.” Quotes are, I think like art. The sayings you remember, the words that inspire you reveal a lot about who you are.

What is particularly interesting to me is that some of the best quotes come from fiction and fiction writers. Great scientists, politicians, philosophers, theologians, and engineers do not seem to have the market cornered in truth or wisdom. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. In the end, I guess I have to agree, as I so often do with Mark Twain's acerbic remark that “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction, fiction has to make sense.”

That evil genius Nietzsche thought that “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” I don’t agree. Most of my truly great thoughts occur when I am trying to sleep but can’t. There seems to be something about the conscious process of relaxing, trying to sleep that on a subconscious level triggers my mind. While trying to get to sleep last night, tossing and mumbling to myself in bed at 3:30 in the morning, I had a much more extensive essay planned out. Now, in the light of day with the grass begging to be mowed, the flowerbeds wanting weeding and the floor screaming to be mopped, I can’t remember half of what I wanted to write.

But, as the French say, "C'est la vie"

 I want to start blogging again. Not that I have any readers left. But, it helps me cope

5 Laws of Government
#1. Never underestimate the stupidity of bureaucrats.

#2. Any power that a government has will eventually be abused.

#3. It is far easier to never give government power than to recover power after it has been given to a government. In fact, retrieving power that has been abused by a government almost always requires force and bloodshed

#4. The sole purpose of any government is to perpetuate itself. Government does not exist to aid, help, protect or serve those governed; only to ensure that the structures and systems of the government endure.
 
#5. The scariest sentence in any language is, as Ronald Reagan said: "We're from the government and we're her to help you!"

There are no exceptions to any of these rules

The Tropical Christmas Carrol this year

I'm Dreaming of a Tropical Christmas

I'm dreaming of a tropical Christmas.
Just like I'll have right here on Guam.
Where the seaside glistens and tourists listen to the sound of wind in the palm trees.

I'm dreaming of a tropical Christmas
With every Christmas card, I write.
May your days be merry and bright and may the sand this Christmas be white.

I'm dreaming of a tropical Christmas.
So unlike the ones I used to know.
I find myself pining and sometimes whining for those holidays so long ago

I'm dreaming of a tropical Christmas.
With every Christmas light, I see.
How I wish that we were all here! And may we see each other next year.

Merry Christmas Everyone.

A quick and simplified (but essentially accurate) history of Astrology and why it is Bogus.

Imagine that you are a guy or gal in ancient Babylonia. One day you happen to get up before dawn because you have a cramp in your back and decide you need to walk a bit to stretch it out. So, as you take your exercise doing laps around the top of your ziggurat, the sun begins to rise.
You are struck with a moment of pure genius. The sun moves! It makes a circle around the Earth which is flat and standing still. You know the Earth is stationary because it is obvious. You can’t feel it move. It is stationary. You know it is flat because you’ve just looked from the top of your ziggurat across the Mesopotamian plain. The Earth is flat as far as the eye can see.
Once you’ve figured out that the Sun revolves around the flat Earth, you begin to see that other things revolve around the Earth too. The moon, the planets, and stars all follow more or less the same pattern. Everything, except for planets that will temporary appear in retrograde motion rise in the East and set in the West.
As you keep watching you see patterns in the stars. These look like animals and people. You figure out that the sun moves in the closest circle around the Earth because it provides so much heat. Then the moon because it is so big, then all the planets in another plane or sphere come next. Finally, all the stars are in the outmost sphere at an equal distance from you. You, who are obviously a child of the gods, are standing at the center of the universe. This is wonderful!
As you keep looking you realize that the stars are grouped together to form the outlines of people and animals. They must be divine! They must be trying to tell you something. So, over time you develop a system of interpreting what you believe the stars are saying to you. This system is eventually so popular that it is borrowed by the Egyptians, the Greeks those guys down in India and even the Chinese, Roman, Arabs and Medieval Europe. You have invented Astrology.
Here’s the problem. Almost none of the stuff you based the system on is true. The Earth is not flat. The sun, the planets, and the stars don’t revolve around the Earth (Though the moon does). It is the Earth moving about the sun and rotating that causes the apparent movement, not the sun moving. Lastly, and really importantly, as far as we can now tell the Earth is not the center of the universe. Yet, all of those things I listed must be true for astrology to be true. Because they are not true Astrology isn't true.
The Planets all have independent orbits, they do not revolve in the same plane or sphere, and they are not all located the same distance away. Furthermore, the stars are not equidistance from us. Some are literally thousands and hundreds of thousands of times farther away than others. What this means is that what we perceive as constellations aren’t really groups of stars at all. For example, the three stars in Orion's belt are many light-years away from each other. One is, I think actually closer to us than it is to the other two. What we see when we look at constellations is a phenomenon called pareidolia. Our brains are hard-wired to see faces and animals that are hiding. If you lived in a grass hut near lions or wolves, it is a good ability to have. Sometimes this ability tricks us into seeing things that are not there.
But, your troubles are still worse. Due to wobbles in the Earths rotation the appearance of the constellations changes over time and indeed has changed in historical times. So the star charts created by you the Babylonian guy or gal all those years ago are worthless, and astrologers have had to surreptitiously update them over the centuries.
Almost nothing about the system you, that ancient guy or gal in Babylon created is true. About the only thing you got right was that the moon revolves around the Earth. But, even there you were wrong because you thought that the moon was farther away than the sun. You didn’t have enough information. You didn’t know how the solar system actually worked. Your system of astrology is simply bogus. The fact that it became so popular in the middle ages was simply a by-product of the guys in the middle ages not knowing how the solar system worked either.
Astrology cannot be believed by ANYONE who understands how the solar system and universe works.
Astrology is simply a gigantic waste of time.

4Chan just Trolled the CIA!

Don't be fooled

California Democrats legalize child prostitution

California Democrats legalize child prostitution: Beginning on Jan. 1, prostitution by minors will be legal in California. Yes, you read that right. SB 1322 bars law enforcement from arresting sex workers who are under the age of 18 for soliciting or engaging in prostitution, or loitering with the intent to do so. So teenage girls (and boys) in California will soon be free to have sex in exchange for money without fear of arrest or prosecution. This terribly destructive legislation was written and passed by the progressive Democrats who control California's state government with a two-thirds supermajority. To their credit, they are sincere in their belief that decriminalizing underage prostitution is good public policy that will help victims of sex trafficking. Unfortunately, the reality is that the legalization of underage prostitution suffers from the fatal defect endemic to progressive-left policymaking: it ignores experience, common sense and most of all human nature — especially its darker side.