To My Neighbors Dedicated to Defending Our Beloved Governor Inslee

I miss Texas. Somebody comes onto your property you don't have to wait for them to actually shoot you. Your home is your castle and if someone comes into your castle, they take their lives in their hands. Governor Inslee is a pathetic governor in my opinion. It is only my opinion. He is in no danger from me. Whether he told the cops not to arrest people or not? I don't know. But Democrat run cities all over the Pacific Northwest have hobbled their cops, cut their budgets so they have inadequate resources, and decriminalized shoplifting, burglary, assault (depending on what organization you belong to), arson and have ordered their law enforcement people not to pursue criminals (unless they are spray painting the mayor's house or something heinous like that). You can walk into any Seattle store and so long as you only swipe $25 or less in merchandise, the store can't arrest you and the cops won't come, nor will the courts prosecute you. Why do you think people from Seattle are pouring into Puyallup, filling up all those new apartment complexes and McMansions as fast as they can build 'em.

You can say what you like, call folks trolls, accuse them of lying, but the fact is we've got criminals pillaging our neighborhoods and we're seeing the courts do catch and release or worse, do nothing at all even if the cops do arrest them. Remember the guy last year that set fire to the median on the highway going south from Puyallup?  He was arrested, released in a few hours and walked down the street and broke into a business. Then this Spring he got caught thanks to some neighbors looking out for each other as he was running around our neighborhoods stealing from cars, mailboxes, and houses. You can rave on about how it's not the fault of our overlords in Olympia that Seattle, once a beautiful city, is beginning to look like a war zone. If it stayed there in Seattle, well, they asked for it. But chaos, destruction and crime tend to leak out into neighboring cities.

So defend the powers that be if you want. I mean many of you defending the governor and his minions voted for the guy and it's very hard to admit you may have made a mistake. I get it. But the fact that people perceive the big guy as the problem, is a fairly common response. When Trump was president, the same people defending Inslee were confident that Trump was the root of all evil.

We're playing politics while our neighborhoods are becoming less safe, we've got thieves cruising our streets, perverts exposing themselves to children, porch pirates and mailbox thieves operating with impunity. Something's wrong and if we don't do something about it, it's going to get unlivable around here. Someone broke my mailbox and stole my wife's medication - something she critically needed. As I said, I'm from Texas, and down there, the neighbors would have delivered these hoodlums hog-tied to the cops in short order. It's incredible to me that we have video of these crimes being committed and of the perps who committed them and all anyone can do is say "Watch out."

Flight out of this state has begun in earnest. You can pick up a house full of furniture on Facebook Marketplace for free because people can't get big enough U-Hauls to take all their stuff, so they are giving it away. This state is going to run out of taxpayers in short order, just like California and Oregon are. If our governor and legislature successfully disarm us all, it's going to get really interesting here in the neighborhood. There's an old Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times." Well, it's getting more interesting all the time.

I'm old and crippled up, but I will stand watch if someone will organize such a thing. The elderly and those with children, like the mother of the kid a pair of perverts tried to run down and abduct last week (caught on camera), are particularly worried. And we're hearing no sign that this state's government has any intention of doing something about the rampant crime and the threat to our most vulnerable citizens other than remove the ability of citizens to defend themselves with firearms. I'm too old to take a refresher karate class, so hand to hand combat is no longer a viable way to defend hearth and home, especially when, unless you're about to shoot a home invader, the cops may or may not come.

So please before you dismiss the concerns of people you call trolls, how about responding to their concerns with some compassion. Calling a person, a troll is as much hate speech as their anger at Inslee. I suspect the governor isn't worried about the people who are angry with him, anyway. He has enough people in Seattle alone, both the living and the dead, to get himself reelected. He doesn't need anyone to defend him to the rubes out in the hinterlands.

We're neighbors for crying out loud. This forum is one way of getting communication going in an age where we live in boxes, commute to work in boxes with wheels, and work in cubicles. We don't sit on the porch much and if you want to meet your neighbors, you need to walk about 3 miles a day. You'll run into some lovely older folk and their dogs and have nice friendly conversations. Oddly enough, most face-to-face encounters don't include anything upsetting about Jay Inslee so you shouldn't have to defend him.

I will tell you this, if I see flashers, porch pirates, thieves and child abductors operating around my area, I won't stand quietly by. I've taken a more militant path to neighborhood security. Take whatever meaning you wish from that.

Have a lovely summer day. I'm looking forward to the summer heat we are being promised. My joints like the heat and the reduced dampness and I'm a lot less cranky when my arthritis isn't trying to beat me into submission.

See you around the 'hood, folks.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

Now One of Our Post-Modern Influencers Says We Need a New Flag

How's this for a flag inspired by the philosophy espoused by the party
of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and burning crosses and churches?

 

Apparently, one of our post-modern versions of a societal influencer, Grammy winning R&B singer Macy Gray has opined this week on the tragic unwokeness of our American flag. She says we need a new one because the old Stars and Stripes is as obsolete as the Confederate Stars and Bars and racially offensive. Also, according to Gray, the American flag has become "code" for a specific belief, namely mainstream American conservativism. She doesn't say that, directly but I have it on good authority that "specific belief" is progressive code for conservatism and/or Republicans. These days everything is code. We haven't had to work so hard breaking code since World War II when we had to decipher the Japanese military codes and German Enigma codes in order not to be forcibly "woke" by our racially superior foes. Everything we say means something other than what we actually said anymore. This sort of linguistic bullying is familiar to me. I encountered it a lot on school playgrounds when bullies decide the skinny, bespectacled nerdy me was someone they could safely give ugly nicknames to, attach crude suggestions to and/or to punch in the face. The bullies I encounter in my adulthood use words like racist, suggest I'm a bigot, and delete my social media posts. Words like systemic racism covers a multitude of the perceived sins of anyone who disagrees with them. 

To combat this nation's "systemic racism" Oberst Gray suggest we create a new flag. The Grammy Award-winning artist argues that "the American flag’s stars ought to include all skin tones rather than being solely white in order to include all of the nation’s citizens."

So I designed them a new flag along those lines that anticipates further demands for inclusion of symbols/codes for other "woke" belief systems. I have a theory that "inclusive" to progressives means dragging those with certain "specific beliefs" to the base of the progressive "woke" idol. This flag meets several criteria for a "woke" flag.

1. The three main colors are actually sampled from the skin colors of minority races, black, middle-eastern, and Asian specifically. The pink is there to represent women, LGBTQ, and woke white wealthy politicians.
   
2. The feminist symbol was included instead of stars. The progressive ideal is to centralize all power as to make state authority null and void. It's how progressives see "unity" - a system in which there is only one choice.
3. Reduced the number of stripes to 12 since the number 13 is considered bad juju in many minority cultures.
4. None of the evil whiteness is represented. In the new flag, white people are marginalized, even banished from American life for our sins.
   

This flag represents progressive ideas of unity in which all the successfully incorporated into the progressive plantation and who demonstrate their obedient voluntary servitude. the goal of progressive socialism of the sort that people like Macy Gray salivate over reminds me of this Gary Larson cartoon. The cave man has killed a mammoth and opened a primeval version of a soup kitchen. Want to guess what's on the menu? The second cave man, wishing to preserve the illusion of his own freedom, orders exactly what he would have gotten whatever he had asked for.

I don't know about anyone else, but I am sick of elitist snowflakes trying to tell me and everyone else how we must believe, what outrageous nonsense we must accept, what we must surrender to the state and how we must live, and it's all to preserve their authority and privilege status. I've been saying for decades that this is about restoring the elite noble privileged classes to rule over us. They have invoked those who would move us away from dependence on God - Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Wells, Shaw, Maslow, Skinner and (God help us) they even quote Mao as authority for the belief that we should surrender our will to the state and to the elite uber(wo)men who run it.

I do not hold to that. I aim to misbehave.

© by Tom King

 

Skeptics Dismiss Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge as Overblown

Desmond atop Hacksaw Ridge

I watched Hacksaw Ridge again this afternoon and was blown away by the miracle of what Desmond Doss did that day. The man had angels at his shoulder. The picture to the left is of Desmond standing atop Hacksaw Ridge at the spot where he lowered 75 to 100 wounded men down off the escarpment. When they strung up the cargo net they used for climbing the cliff, Doss was one of three men who offered to test it by climbing up first. During the time alone at the top of the cliff that he lowered the wounded from with his double bowline knot that he learned in the Adventist Pathfinder club as a kid, Doss often stood erect as he worked while snipers tried to shoot him.

After the war, Doss toured Japan and after one speech a Japanese man approached him and told Doss he'd been a sniper on Hacksaw that day. "I tried to shoot you," he told Doss, "But my gun refused to fire. It had never done that before or after." Angels certainly stood at Desmond's shoulder that day.

As I was reading some YouTube reviews of the movie today, it was disheartening to see the way this movie was dismissed by know-it-all young people who kept calling the movie "unrealistic", overblown,  and exaggerated. They knowing claimed that Mel Gibson embellished Doss's heroism the way he did William Wallace's in Braveheart. It was hard to tell by some of the caustic comments whether they held a grudge against Gibson or against a religious man of principle like Doss being held up as a hero.

The truth is Gibson left out a lot of stuff Doss did that day because he thought no one would believe it. At the end where Doss kicked a hand grenade and was wounded was real. After the closing sequence of the movie where he was being lowered on a stretcher, a lot more happened that Gibson chose not to show because nobody would have believed it. 

On the way to the field hospital, Doss saw a wounded man he believed in more danger than he was and rolled off the litter and told the stretcher bearers to take the other guy. On the way to the hospital, Doss was wounded by sniper fire, dressed his own wound and crawled the rest of the way to the field hospital on his own. 

There are not many people who believe in that level of miracle anymore, nor do they believe a principled religious man could do anything that heroic without opening fire with a machine gun leaving a pile of bodies behind. The part of the movie that got to me was Doss carrying out another wounded man, praying out loud, "God help me get just one more!" 

Doss rescued 50 by his count, 100 by the count of the men at the bottom of the cliff and the compromise count of the medal of honor citation was 75. And you have to remember Doss had already won medals in two island campaigns and talked the medics corps into letting him go into battle with his unit instead of staying back at the field hospital. God only knows how many lives he saved.

It's sad that our young people feel such a powerful need to disparage acts of courage, faithfulness, unselfish love and honor. In our sad little world heroism is too often about acts of violence. Love is too often entirely about sex. Acts of mercy have ulterior motives and nothing decent gets done without someone asking, "What's in it for me?"

If you watch Hacksaw Ridge again, remember this. The man depicted in the film did more than what was shown in those couple of days on Okinawa and you're only being shown a part of the story and what you do see is the truth about this decent and brave man.

There are heroes out there folk that are real and don't wear capes and tights.

© 2021 by Tom King