Friday, December 29, 2017

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 it is 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 aide, 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: "We're from the government and we're her to help you!"
There are no exceptions to any of these rules

Sunday, December 17, 2017

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.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

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.