Disney Goes Woker!

Retitled Snow White and the 7 Magical Creatures.
Wonder what would happen if a white guy played
Shaka Zulu in a movie? Almost as ludicrous as German
Max Von Sydow playing Jesus - a Jew if you remember.
Jesus with a  German accent! What happened to the
uproar about cultural appropriation?

 

Well, Disney goes even more woke with a version of Snow White that should be retitled Snow "Brown" and the 7 "Magical Creatures". So long Caucasian German princess. Goodbye 6 of the 7 dwarfs. That's put 6 diminutive actors out of a job. Kind of sucks, but then it was Peter Dinklage's idea. Sucks for him, though. No work for Dinklage either. And he'd have made a lovely Grumpy.

Seems there's only one race going to be canceled in the New Disneyworld Order. Seems a little lop-sided to take one culture's children's stories and "appropriate" them wholesale. There are plenty of stories in every culture that could benefit from the Disney touch. They've already demonstrated that they don't have to depend entirely on the Brother's Grimm. They did Jungle Book, Mulan, Lion King, Kung Fu Panda, Coco and others. Plenty of great stories there. 

It seems a shame that a message is being sent to the kids of one culture that their traditional stories aren't good enough unless they are adjusted to a different, less objectionable ethnicity than their own. Seems, if not racist, at least...........well no. It's definitely racist. But then what do you expect from the staunch allies of the party that fully embraced progressivism in the first place? The party of Jim Crow, the KKK, the Civil War, slavery, lynchings, segregation and separate but unequal. Seems they need at least one race to discriminate against. But like their white supremacist political roots, they have to divide the dominant new "minority" into liberal whites and conservative whites.

And apparently it's us conservative honkies that are the source of everyone's problems.

© 2023 by Tom King

How Do You Solve a Problem like a Brandon?

Just watched a kid go through our
neighbor's car. I let them know...

 

I posted the following on our neighborhood website. I received an immediate community standards warning. The site's omnipotent moral busybodies that monitor the site will likely take it down, so I've posted my comment here. The kid in the photo to the left had just looted someone's car and got caught on camera. His picture was posted on the Nextdoor app which triggered a lot of angry talk and apparently the name of the kid AND his parents. There was a lot of frustrated talk on the thread with the picture, but not a lot of helpful advice. Gossiping about it isn't terribly helpful either. Here's what I suggested that apparently is anti-woke and must, therefore, be censored.

If this kid has stolen from you or broken into your car, visit the parents in person. Often these folk will nit pick and argue about proof and try to tell you it couldn't be their child. Of course, they know better, but that doesn't mean they'll admit it. Do not attack the parents. They're probably out of their depth. Just state your case, be kind and talk about consequences.

I had to do that once with a kid who beat up my son and left him with a bloody eyeball and me with a $200 doctor bill. His parents spoke no English so I had the bully translate for me. I am certain he did not do so accurately, but they got enough of what I was saying and he heard me promise to carry his fuzzy behind to the police station. He said I couldn't do that and I would be arrested if I did. I told him he'd best hope we didn't wind up in the same jail.  He did not touch my son again which kept my son safe and I didn't have to wrestle with authorities unwilling to act.

You won't leave that house feeling like the parents got the point, but they will. This sort of parent does not want to see you at their front door again, nor do they want to see more pictures of their delinquent son on the Internet. The kid will get over it and perhaps he will learn that his folks may let him get away with it, but the community will not. It may be one of those key points in a young life where they turn back onto the path toward becoming a good person. I've seen it happen. Don't underestimate the power of communicating honestly and remembering to treat all as you would like to be treated.  That's the power of sites like this. We used to sit on porches and talk to the neighbors. Builders stopped putting porches on our houses so the Internet and sites like this have to take on that role.

Remember these steps:
1. Visit the parents
2. Offer to help
3. Outline the consequences of his continued behavior
4. Remind them that not everyone would bother to talk to his parents about his dangerous behavior.

Not sure if this will be kept up here on Nextdoor. I've been warned that it's against community standards. I don't know how, for it is an effective method for dealing with the problem without:

    (a) ruining the kid's life
    (b) trying to go through overworked under-motivated authorities
    (c) convincing the kid that no one is going to stop him.
    (d) Shooting his butt with a load of rock salt when you catch him
            (my great grandfather's solution)

Do not underestimate the power of community for good or evil. Bring problems out into the open. Do not just gossip. People including kids are reluctant to misbehave if everyone is watching and expressing their disapproval with patience and kindness. It's possible to set points beyond which bad behaviors will not be tolerated with kindness. Watch your language and name-calling. Assume the best of others and often they will rise to the occasion.

Just sayin'
Tom King
Alderwood Estates

The Constitution's Governmental Cage Match Works

 

Leave the cage alone!

The US Constitution brilliantly created a style of government that resembles, if nothing else in modern culture - the inimitable wrestling cage match. The recent kerfuffle over the Supreme Court has pundits coming out of the woodwork with suggestions ranging from a constitutional convention of states (there's a scary idea) to packing the court, a practice that could go on until there are 40 or 50 judges on the court and nothing would ever get done. The biggest complaint from my side of the political aisle is that allowing the packing of the court would make the court an arm of whatever party that packed the court more effectively.

This would be a very bad idea I believe. The Supreme Court is not, nor should not be an arm of the administration or of the congress. It serves as the arbiter between those two branches and the Constitution. While there is this idealism around how law and judicial justice should be free of contamination by religious tenets and beliefs, that's just not possible, especially since people who consider themselves non-religious bring their own ideology/religion to bear in how they view laws and justice. Marxism, socialism, atheism and other anti-Christian ideologies are as much religion as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. 

The Western legal tradition draws most of its view of what is legal and what should not be from the stone tablets Moses dragged down from Mt. Sinai (and promptly broke). It says something that despite Israel's apostasy and Moses' temper tantrum, God made him climb back up the mountain and this time to carve a copy of the commandments out of rock. Western law is built on the code inscribed on those tablets.

There is a place in Revelation full of symbolism which seems to say that His people would, near the end of time, flee to a wilderness place of safety from rising persecution. I think He was talking about the United States, which in its time became a refuge from religious persecution for all sorts of Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution and more than a few Catholics who were on the receiving end of persecution by both church and state. 

One of the symbols for this refuge to which the "woman" (God's church invisible) flees is symbolized by another beast that was like a lamb but spoke like a dragon. Having confronted a bull buffalo once, I suspect that was what John saw. Don't mess with those guys. The buffalo would be an excellent symbol for a place of refuge. The American bison is pretty peaceful mostly, but threaten the herd or more foolishly, their calves, and they'll flip your car upside down and tramp on it. Later the lamblike beast

The point is that the Constitution was brilliantly designed to limit governmental power. It basically created a cage match arena that pits 3 coequal powers against each other if they disagree yet gives them the ability to cooperate when it makes overwhelming sense to do so. The Constitution surrounds the arena, limiting the fight to the inside of the arena and regulating what comes out of the arena to the rest of us.

As a conservative, I prefer to keep the power of the arena limited. Fight it out all y'all wish, but only let out of the arena what everybody is, if not happy with, at least able to accept with some grace. I admit I prefer my judicial system to lean to the right (Ecclesiastes 10:2), but that there should be some debate, I find healthy. The Supreme Court has made some bad decisions in the past, Dred Scott, Buck v. Bell, Plessy v Ferguson, Roe v. Wade (I know some will disagree violently with me on that last one, but I rather think that a decision that led to the death of more than 52 million unborn infants is one of the more horrible ones since Herod, Pharoah, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and others who took on themselves power to murder millions by government decree.

For closing in on 2 1/2 centuries, the system has worked to stem the tide of evil caused by greed, self-centeredness, lust for power and the odd burst of mass insanity. It's no surprise then that people with an agenda, facing a system that blocks them at most every turn would want to alter the Constitution or simply ignore it and do what they want. So far the venerable document has managed to hold on, balancing power to kind of hold at bay the principal articulate by Frank Herbert. "It's not that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptible." 

So long as we can make the urge to tyrannical power too difficult to accomplish within the arena, we'll be okay. But beware of those who would tear down the cage that holds them in. They are not your friends. They are enemies of America as it is.

© 2023 by Tom King