Phil Elmore's Blog, page 27

The Boston Marathon and the Lib-osecond

At least three dead. Severed limbs.  People who will never walk again. A dead eight-year-old boy. A peaceful sporting event sundered by a pair of explosions — and at least one other explosive device destroyed by a water cannon after police found it. The day was April 15, Patriot’s Day, and the Boston Marathon has been the site of a vicious terrorist attack.

Supposedly the area was swept for explosives.  Experts claim the location was in “lock-down” for 48 hours. Speculation is that whomever brought the bombs just wandered in with the rest of the crowd and placed them.  At least one man, a Saudi national, has been detained for questioning, but nobody knows if he’s yet another victim or truly a “person of interest.”  At least one terrorist group, the Pakistani Taliban, has denied any involvement in the bombing.

The response from the media, however, was entirely predictable. The Oklahoma City Bombing took place on the 19th of April; this was supposedly in revenge for the raid in Waco, Texas at the Branch Davidian compound. The date has been associated with “right-wing” militia and domestic terrorist groups ever since.  But North Korea, which has been threatening to nuke the United States, just has a marathon as well, and the bombing took place on Kim Il Sun’s birthday.  There are any number of reasons a foreign group could have chosen the Boston Marathon, which featured participants and dignitaries from multiple nations.

Given all this, we don’t yet know whom to blame or whom to suspect.  A lack of facts never stops the left-leaning media from rushing to the nearest microphone in order to slander conservatives, however, and it was only a matter of minutes after the bombing before liberal talking heads were blaming “the right” while dismissing out of hand the possibility of extremist Muslim involvement.

The shortest measurement of time known to science isn’t the nanosecond or the picosend, but a fraction of the smaller of these: it is the lib-osecond, the period of time between any terrorist attack and the first attempt by a liberal or “progressive” reporter to blame the attack on “the tea party.”

Gun Grab and Permit Suspension: It Gets Worse

It turns out that the Buffalo man whose permit was suspended under the New York SAFE Act was simply the wrong guy.  Of course, that may be a lie; it may be the case that, given the immediate bad publicity — “Man Who Once Took Anxiety Drugs Gets His Guns Taken Away” — the Powers That Are decided to brush it all under the rug by claiming it was a mistake.  If this fellow was the wrong guy, who is the right guy?  And is there really grounds for taking HIS guns?

Buffalo man’s pistol permit wrongly suspended under the state Safe Act

“An Erie County man whose pistol permit was wrongly suspended under the state’s new gun control law is getting his handguns back,” reads the news story.  “David Lewis of Amherst, a 35-year-old college librarian, was told last week by the Erie County Clerk’s Office to surrender his seven handguns he uses for target shooting because his pistol permit had been suspended under the mental health provisions of the New York Safe Act. …It turns out authorities went after the wrong pistol permit holder.”

There’s a significant little tidbit in the article, however:

“Lewis is represented by attorney James Tresmond, who said state police recommended his client’s license suspension based on his prior use of a widely-prescribed anti-anxiety medication… [but] state police denied that, saying prescription drug records are private and not shared with the state. Tresmond said his client has no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket.” [emphasis added]

In other words, somebody is lying.  Either Kim Jong Andy’s personal gestapo, the New York State Police, are lying about using this man’s health records (illegally, given the provisions of healthcare privacy laws — which the SAFE Act violates) or Lewis’ lawyer is lying about what they told him concerning the reason for the suspension. Which is it?

The purpose of the SAFE act is almost exclusively to create new methods whereby law-abiding citizens may be declared criminals.

Technocracy: Demands for ‘knife control’ already upon us

My WND Technocracy column this week was inspired by some research I did on the new TSA rules for carry-on of pocketknives.

Fantastically, the report of the mass stabbing has actually elicited some calls for more gun control in Texas.

The change in the rules has drawn fire from both politicians (angry they weren’t consulted about the change) and special interest groups, notably a large flight attendant union-and-lobbying group.

Read the full column here in WND News.

Miscalculation: A Noir Tale of Skull Morgan

The Entrypoint novellas in the Simon Vector series are a lot of fun.  I’ve always been a sucker for backstory — for details that make a character seem more real.  To me, every time you see a character in a novel, it should feel as if that person had a life before you encountered them, and will go on to have a life after you have left them (unless you see them die, of course).  A novel is a window into a moment of existence in the lives of multiple people, and as you know from real life, people are complex.  Every one of them has a saga, be it dull or interesting, sordid or inspiring.

The novellas Correction and Corruption were a horror tale and a sci-fi Western, respectively.  They gave us the backstories of Gerald Ruhming, a minor but important villain in the full-length novel Simon Vector, and Jayson Boothe, an imperial marshal whose story touches on that of Ruhming’s (and who makes what is essentially a cameo appearance in Simon Vector). Each story ends with the character in prison on Alpha Draconis, the setting of the full-length novel.  Each of these three stories can be read in any order, independently of each other.  Together they build a complex, dystopian, and corrupt future world whose central message could easily be, “People will screw you.”

Never is that more apparent than in Miscalculation: A Noir Tale of Skull Morgan.  With the third novella in the Simon Vector Entrypoint series, a pattern that could have been coincidence now emerges as obvious.  I am not telling you anything you do not already know by saying that the novella ends with Skull Morgan in prison on Alpha Draconis.  He has to end up there for the novel to occur.  But who is Skull Morgan? What are his motivations? How did he end up in a prison largely reserved for murderers and serial rapists, when he is clearly much more intelligent than most of the other inmates?

Miscalculation answers those questions, and in the process paints a picture of a rogue and schemer who is actually very likable in his own way.  Knowing Morgan’s ultimate fate, it is almost a shame to see him in his element.  He has so much potential and will fall so far that watching him do it is almost a tragedy.  I say “almost” because, ultimately, Morgan’s own actions are the cause of his undoing, and watching him get where he must go is the essence of a noir crime thriller like this one.

14 Stabbed in Texas; New York Man’s Permit Pulled

The bad news in the gulag of New York State continues.  Kim Jong Andrew Cuomo laughed and sneered at those wacky gun nuts who complained the New York SAFE Act would be used to disarm law-abiding New Yorkers and confiscate their firearms.  Well, it is now being used for that purpose, just as New York’s gun owners knew it would be.

A man in Amherst, New York, has hired a lawyer to sue on the grounds that his rights (including those under healthcare privacy laws) have been violated because his permit was abruptly pulled. In New York you are guilty until proven innocent when it comes to a handgun permit. This as-yet unnamed man believes his permit was suspended because he once took anti-anxiety drugs.  He has no criminal record and does not now take them, but he was forced to turn in 4,000 dollars worth of handguns to the Gestapo (excuse me, the New York State Police).

This figure represents seven handguns that will be destroyed in one year if his case has not moved through the courts.  Given the glacial pace at which the law moves, chances are this man will never see his handguns again.  Predictably, some sheep in New York are already bleating, “What do you need 4,000 dollars worth of guns for?”  The idea that it is not your government’s or your neighbors’ place to tell you what you “need” where the Bill of Rights is concerned simply never enters many people’s minds.

Meanwhile, another crazy-eyed, grinning fuck has stabbed 14 people on a college campus in Texas using a razor knife.  No doubt this disappoints many people who would like to start pursuing knife bans (now that gun rights in the United States, and particularly in certain states like New York, are being severely infringed).

I did some research on the recent change to the TSA rules which, if they remain in place, will permit the carry of certain small, non-locking pocketknives.  A large flight attendant union that is fighting the ban proclaimed the whole thing the conspiracy of “paid lobbyists” and “corporate interests” from the “knife lobby.”  In other words, the unions and their statist functionaries (not to mention the useful idiots who form their membership) are trying to demonize pocketknives the way they already have vilified guns.

Even though a common utility knife was used in the Texas rampage, I predict that calls for banning common pocketknives will follow.  This is consistent with the illogic of “liberal” and “progressive” politics, which says that when a crime happens, we must immediately punish everyone who did not do it.

Liberals and progressives see all citizens as criminals who simply have not yet been caught.  They design laws accordingly; they assume that all citizens will engage in wrongdoing if they are not impeded from doing so by a web of complicated, invasive restrictions.  In this way, progressives empower the state to control every waking and sleeping moment of your life.  Once they can establish that you are a criminal per some arbitrary, capricious, unconstitutional law, they have the power to penalize or imprison you and thus force you to comply.  This is the vision of every progressive lawmaker: A prison-state in which the little people are slaves to the ruling class of politicians and their supporters.

And by the way, is anyone tired of these crazy assholes who smile about their horrible crimes?  The Texas knifer is a lookalike for the Colorado theater shooter.  This guy should never have made it into police custody.  In a world of men and women instead of sheep and children, he’d have been beaten to death by his fellow students before he ever got there.

Technocracy: Nanny Bloomberg and Kim Jong Andy

My WND Technocracy column this week is about two men I hate with all my heart: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The individual American who does not wish to cede control of his life and his family to the all-powerful state is left with little recourse.

Both men are progressive fascists. Both men want to control every moment of their subjects’ waking lives. Both men are autocrats who hate the Constitution and who believe they can run Americans’ lives better than can American citizens themselves.

It is my fervent hope that both men will get incurable, socially stigmatized natural illnesses and die horribly of these ailments. Leprosy, for example.

Read the full column here in WND News.

Crisis Diplomacy

My latest SuperBolan novel for Harlequin is Crisis Diplomacy, available 2 April, 2013.

When terrorists hijack an international conference on weapons of mass destruction in Stockholm, the hostages include the U.S. vice president. The ransom, a portion of each country’s GNP, is enough to cripple the world’s economies. Failure to comply ensures the hostages will be tortured and killed on a live video feed.

Mack Bolan has to seize a narrow window of opportunity before the crisis spins out of control — but the tactically sophisticated terrorists stay one step ahead of him, moving the hostages to safe houses around the globe. In a cross-country blitz, he confronts “friendly” multinational forces and enemy special operators, all while racing against the clock to save the Veep.

Technocracy: The Internet Is Hate

“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate…”

My WND Technocracy column this week is about the avalanche of hate you can expect to endure when you express strong opinions online.  If you are effective in stating your opinions, that hatred will only be more intense.

I speak from personal experience.

I’ve been threatened, stalked, libeled, harassed, defamed, and repeatedly insulted.  I’ve had my web hosting company attacked. I’ve been branded a hatemonger by a left-wing political organization. I’ve been forced to retain an expensive attorney who specializes in Internet matters.

And it’s all because I have strong opinions and I am good at telling people what I think.

Read the full column here in WND News.

The Follies of Muckraking Journalism

How many death threats have you received in your life?

How many people follow you around the Internet wishing you ill?

Most normal people can say these numbers are low, if not zero.  I am not most normal people.  I am a writer and, unfortunately for me, I spent a few years very enamored of the concept of muckraking journalism.  I believed I was going to speak truth to power… and truth to stupidity.  I thought truth was the ultimate defense. I thought nothing could stop me.

What I found out was that muckraking journalism is the gift that keeps on giving.  Thanks to writing several articles in the martial arts arena that exposed the false claims of a few different people, I now have a devoted “fan club” of people who hate me and follow me around the Web to tell me so.  They’ve threatened to kill me.  They’ve threatened to sue me.  They’ve defamed, slandered, and libeled me.  They’ve formed entire secret Internet discussion sites devoted to amassing information on me, for the specific purpose of harming me, destroying my reputation, and even killing me.

I’m not complaining, mind you.  As a writer who offers strong opinions in often inflammatory fields of human endeavor, I bring this on myself. I was overjoyed when the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal propaganda group labeled me a hatemonger.  It meant I was entering a new tier of political punditry.  I was getting noticed, and hated, by the right people.  You have to accept that this will occur to a certain degree if you’re going to operate in the battlefield of public opinion.

But I made the problem worse.  I made it worse by making specific enemies. I wrote exposés on individual martial arts personalities who will hate me and threaten me for the rest of my life.  To a certain segment of the “ninjitsu” community, I am the bogeyman.  I am the monster under the bed.  Ninja exponents tell their children to eat their vegetables or Phil Elmore will get them.  Then they call me fat and go online to tell the world what a son of a bitch I am.

Had I to do it all over again, I would have avoided specifically “muckraking” journalism like the plague.  It just isn’t worth the trouble.  I vowed to stop when people who merely commented on articles I wrote received death threats from the subjects of those articles.  Crazy people have a lot of spare time.  They will always have more energy for these online feuds than you.

Learn from my example.  The Internet is, arguably, all about hate.  Everyone hates everyone else.  We hate each other’s opinions and, separated by distance and near-anonymity, we all feel free to tell each other how much we hate them.  There’s no changing that fact.  You will be hated if you express an opinion online… but you can avoid making the problem worse than it has to be.

Think before you write. Consider the repercussions. Count the enemies you will make… and ask yourself if you want to contend with those people for the rest of your life.

Technocracy — He Kicked, She Kicked: Trannies In Sports

At least, she was born a man named Boyd Burton, complete with male genitalia and a Y-chromosome.

My WND Technocracy column this week is about the controversy surrounding “Fallon Fox,” a man who has undergone sexual reassignment surgery and hormone therapy.

Fox has fought other Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) competitors as a woman but was recently forced to reveal his past. He never meant to tell anyone until he was discovered.

Aitators for and against allowing Fox to fight women are arguing over the place of transsexuals in professional sports. Read the full column here in WND News.