I asked the Pentagon about Pete Hegseth's mentor. Then the threats started.
Friedman:"…audience for the smear, clearly, was my peers…meant to scare me into spiking my own story."
…titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A #Cuckold Story,” listed alongside books by #Hegseth and #military histories. They contain #Posobiec's detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and…“#ladyboys”—a term used to refer to #Thai#transgender women…
One of the many, many reasons I love Thai:
Gender is a self spoken expression. We end our sentences with the gender marker we feel to, ka for female or krub for male, we are free to use either as we wish to. In conversation we would never assume the gender of another person, though we would make a guess about whether they were older or younger than us. In Thai culture an age based honorific is used, addressing our elders as P’ or Ba or Yai, etc or someone younger than us as Nong.
When I first encountered this, I didn’t want to disclose my age, my American self had some inner ageism at play. But the longer I’m here the more I love it, to be someone’s P’Lek 😻 is some serious Auntie love. Or to be tucked into the kindness of Nong Lek, I know that I’m being cared for.
A place can be historic without being old, as is usually the case here in Asia. The Thai royalty shared with Japan and two other countries ashes that had helped prove that the Buddha was a historical person. I certainly accept that there was a Gautama or Shakyamuni, but in graduate school I uncovered all sorts of loving embellishments: a huge lore of legends, stories of past lives, miracle birth, and dreams, all rich in symbolism of spiritual growth.
We went to Nagoya to see my wife's mother, and we participated in a ceremony for her late father at Kakuōzan Nittai-ji (名古屋の覚王山日泰寺), which houses the relics shared by King Chulalongkorn. The temple uniquely belongs to no religious sect, yet all the Japanese Buddhist sects take turns providing the head priest to Nittai-ji, which means Japan-Thai temple. It was built in 1904, and it's in the big city, yet it looks quite imposing with the summer sky.