Phil Elmore's Blog, page 28

Those Stupid Christians

I get that some people aren’t big fans of Christianity. There are plenty of reasons to feel that way.  What I don’t get is why anyone bothers to post denunciations of various aspects of Christianity that have no bearing on them.  I don’t care if, say, the Scientologists’ holy scriptures, or the Diaries of Xenu, or whatever the hell they read contradict each other from chapter to chapter.

I don’t hate Scientologists enough to concern myself with what they do — I just get upset when their “church” presumes to infringe on my natural rights.  That’d be something I’d take the time to write about.

I say this without ire and as someone who can be pretty damned insensitive from time to time:  When you post something about how stupid or awful you think Christianity is, take a minute to consider that a good many of the people on your social media lists probably do consider themselves Christians.

Is the issue you’re raising one that infringes on your rights as a non-Christian?  Or are you just bagging on someone else’s faith because you think it, they, or their Bible is stupid?

“Hold Your Fire, On I’m Facebook!”

A 31-year-old upstate New York man who held police at bay for nearly 12 hours apparently was updating his Twitter and Facebook postings during the standoff, officials said.

Police finally used flash-bang grenades and tear gas to remove Ryan Whidden and his wife, Nina, from their home, where Whidden barricaded the pair after discharging a firearm into his own cars in his driveway.

During the ordeal, during which nearby residents were evacuated from the neighborhood, Whidden appeared to mock police, who were speaking to him through a bullhorn.

“I love the robo voice,” he wrote on Facebook shortly before 10:00 am on Monday, roughly 40 minutes after barricading himself in his home with his wife.

He then “liked” his own status, before commenting, at 9:57 a.m., “You all can handle my lightwork [sic].”

Other status updates apparently removed from the account, but which were screen-captured and uploaded by morning-show listeners to local radio station 98.9 The Buzz, were much more ominous.

“You have no clue how long I waited for this day,” Whidden, whose Facebook account says he is a veteran of the United States Army, posted on Facebook. “[M]an the contrast in flavor is sweeter than I imagined.”

He went on to write, “[Expletive] me sideways I have missed killing things.”

Bizarrely, he appears to have gone on to comment on North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, sometime after that before sharing the status update again. And a post to his Twitter account, dated Sunday evening but shared on Monday, defends Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh.

“I am curious how many people calling you stupid, immature or anything never go above the speed limit,” Whidden wrote to Suh’s Twitter account. “[I'm] not holding my breath.”

Whidden was charged with criminal possession of a weapon. He has been arraigned and remanded to the Ontario County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bond. Even as he awaits trial, however, the incident that has put him behind bars is actively being discussed on Facebook, blurring the line between news and popular culture.

“Maybe he heard a noise outside and he was just [following] Joe Biden’s instructions,” wrote one listener to the Buzz morning show on the show’s Facebook fan page. Biden has famously said for those who feel they need to protect themselves to go “Buy a shotgun.”

Read the full news article at WND.

Technocracy: The Absurdity of ‘Zero Tolerance’

When your child is suspended unfairly, refuse. Walk with him to school.

My WND Technocracy column this week is about the rash of incidents in which children have been punished for perfectly innocent behavior.

In part, the problem is caused by liberal hysteria about weapons, which have become a guilt-by-proximity embodiment of libs’ fear, loathing, and projected weakness.

The larger part of the problem, however, is that “zero tolerance” policies take human judgment out of the equation.  This means we no longer consider context.  The result is that we punish the guilty and the innocent equally, guaranteeing that we raise bitter, cynical, apathetic children.

Read the full column here in WND News.

Technocracy: A Tale of Two Dictators

The only good news is that one of them is roasting in Hell.

My WND Technocracy column is about the fact that it’s hard to tell the difference between Hugo Chavez and Barack Hussein Obama.

Both men are socialists who vowed to fundamentally transform their nations.

Both men stayed in power thanks to overwhelming popular support — despite their repeated failures in office and despite lowering the standard of living for their people.

Read the full column here in WND News.

Hope For Ruger 10/22 Owners

New Yorkers who own the most popular .22 LR rifle on the market, the Ruger 10/22, were distressed to find that the ridiculous new “SAFE Act” places this rifle in a legal gray area.  With a pistol grip, it is defined by New York’s titular dictator, Kim Jong Andrew Cuomo as an “assault weapon.”  Without, it still has a ten-round magazine, for which no exemptions have been made in the SAFE Act (nor are any such exemptions likely).  In theory, you are sort of, mostly legal if you load that ten round magazine with only seven rounds… but the law is so poorly written, so hastily conceived, that many gun owners simply aren’t sure what to do.

There may be hope.  I had never before heard of these, but a friend recently informed me that there exist five-round rotary magazines for the 10/22.  These are as hard to find right now as every other magazine, and you’re unlikely to find any large quantities of .22 LR for sale for the foreseeable future… but if you have ammo and you have a Ruger 10/22, these five-round mags could be the key to taking that rifle out shooting without worrying that you’ll be hassled by Kim Jong Andy’s goon squads state troopers.

Good luck finding some.  Demand most assuredly has outstripped available supply.

“Why Don’t You Just Move?”

I’ve lived in New York State all my life.  I have family here; my job is here; I have responsibilities and obligations that tie me to the region.  While I’m not fan of the harsh winters, I’m happy to live somewhere that has few natural disasters and only brief periods of insect life each year. I’m accessible to wonderful resources in terms of shopping, education opportunities, training, martial arts, and just about anything else I could want or need.

I hate my state.

I hate my state because it is ruled by power-mad leftists.  I hate my state because the pendulous tumor that is New York City clings to the belly of New York like a remora, bullying Upstate’s voters with its dense population base and forcing the rest of the state to cater to its whims. I hate my state because, in the dead of night, our governor suspended by fiat the requirement for debate and comment on new legislation, ramming his sweeping gun ban down our throats with almost no discussion or disclosure.  The new law effectively makes second-class citizens of all gun owners, registering them and their ammo purchases while outlawing all modern semi-automatic pistols (by banning even ten-round magazines).

I used to really enjoy recreational shooting.  I possess a great deal of close-quarters firearms training.  I took all that training right here in New York State.  There’s very little chance I will be able to do so again.  Even if I ran handgun classes with a revolver or carbine classes with a lever-action rifle, I’d be unable to buy ammunition in the quantity I needed.  I will be reduced to training with airsoft and laser training pistols for the foreseeable future.  This will have a significant impact on my lifestyle.  Knowing this, I sold all my firearms in anticipation of these dark times.

People living in other states, “free” states (the number of which is dwindling as more states enact their own gun and magazine bans), often say to me, “Why don’t you just move?”  They say this blithely, casually, as if it’s the obvious solution to an obvious problem.  This attitude has never made any sense to me.

There may, in fact, be people who have so few responsibilities, so much liquid cash, and so many contacts in other states that moving from one end of the country to its middle is a viable option.  I don’t happen to be one of them.  Even if I did not have obligations that tie me to this area, exactly how does one quickly find a new job in a new state where one has never lived?

Try finding ANY job in this economy, in Obama’s environment of malaise and uncertainty, much less exactly the job you want at the pay level you require.  Then there are the logistics.  It isn’t cheap to move down the street, depending on your lease or mortgage obligations.  Multiply the expense many times to go from one state to another.

The money isn’t the issue, though.  I could pay to move.  I could absorb all the costs.  I’ve even learned well enough, over the years, that I will gladly throw money at gorillas with trucks rather than try to move all my junk myself when it comes to furniture and so on.  This would be money well spent.  But it wouldn’t change the fact that to leave the state I’d have to have a job waiting for me elsewhere… and I’d have to have no family or economic responsibilities here in New York.  I have more options than most when it comes to the former.  Any lifetime New Yorker is all too aware of the latter.

Those of you who live in free states, I envy you.  I hope Obama doesn’t manage to do to you at the federal level what has already been done to me in my state.  I appreciate that you care about me and want me to be free and happy.  In many cases I do, in fact, wish I could come join you.  The fact is, however, that moving is not an option for me at this time.  This is true for many New Yorkers.  When you tell us to “just move,” you are being insulting, although I realize you don’t mean it that way.

I would love to escape from New York.  It simply isn’t something I can do right now.  We’ll see what the future brings, but until then, I will remain a prisoner of the Empire State.  Telling me casually to walk out the front gate doesn’t change my situation in any way.

Good Luck, Bob Lonsberry

Media personality Bob Lonsberry, who has the show leading into Rush Limbaugh’s on WHAM 1180 in Rochester, NY, has been a fixture of local talk radio for years.  I listen to him every morning at work and, years ago when I first worked in the greater Rochester area, I listened to him then, too.  Apparently during a period in which I worked too far away to listen, Bob got divorced, got remarried, lost his radio show (due to spurious allegations of “racism”), got a new show in Utah, got his show in Rochester back, and lost his show in Utah. Then he ended up replacing, on Syracuse’s 570 WSYR, the most annoying radio host ever to inflict his mannerisms on the public airwaves — Jim Reith.

Jim Reith used to have the radio show after Limbaugh on WSYR.  The result was radio whiplash that delighted WSYR’s lib minority listenership, as they had the chance to call in and flog conservatives while Reith lied about his politics (he was a Catholic who opposed abortion, but on all other issues he was a Democrat, deriding conservatives at every opportunity and always defending political figures like the Clintons).

The most annoying thing about Reith wasn’t his political leanings, though — it was his mannerisms.  At one time I created a Jim Reith drinking game based on his many on-air tics. Did Jim repeat the same sentence verbatim for emphasis? Drink. Did Jim defend Bill or Hillary Clinton? Drink.  Did Jim claim Laura Ingraham “just makes fun of people?” Drink.

“‘The Jim Reith Drinking Game’ has been around since winter,” wrote a reporter for Syracuse.com in 2003, “encouraging listeners in tongue-in-cheek style to take a sip every time Reith says ‘outstanding,’ cuts off a caller or does something else familiar. Reith laughed as he read the game’s rules on the air in February after Central New York writer Phil Elmore posted them at philelmore.com.”

When Lonsberry replaced Reith, it was a twofold victory (for me).  First, the sliver that was Jim Reith had finally been tweezed from the inflamed collective epidermis of the CNY listening audience.  Second, Bob Lonsberry was now on the radio in the morning AND in the evening, allowing me to listen to parts of both shows depending on when I was commuting across the region.  I travel a LOT for work, so entertaining and engaging talk radio is very important to me.

(Reith was subsequently hired by WCNY, the local public television station, and one would think his left-leaning sensibilities would fit right in there.  He was fired abruptly last December; his employers cited “viewer response and underwriter support.”  Translation? The station’s viewers and sponsors didn’t like him any more than I do.)

But I digress.  This morning, Bob Lonsberry opened his show by discussing the gun rights rally taking place in Albany today.  I wish I could be at the rally, but I was not able to arrange for the time away.  I am nonetheless grateful to the many friends and fellow gun owners (of which I am formerly one) who I know are there today, protesting New York’s unconstitutional “SAFE Act” and the illegal, immoral manner in which the law was rammed down voters’ throats overnight, without review and with almost no debate.

The law makes felons of honest gun owners who fail to turn in or register various magazines and firearms that were previously legal.  It is also a de facto ban of almost all modern semi-automatic pistols in New York State, as manufacturers won’t ship guns or ammunition to New York now (thanks to its ridiculous seven-round magazine limit and uncertainty over background checks for ammo purchases).

As you can imagine, the law has been the subject of much discussion.  I have written several WND columns about it.  I started this Unregistered Assault Weapon blog to chronicle the aftermath of the hard decisions it has prompted in New York gun owners.  They can make me sell my AK47, but they can’t take my mind — and to power-greedy politicians, it is the free mind that is the most dangerous “assault weapon.”  We’ve seen that in recent legislation, signed quietly by Obama, that makes it possible for the Secret Service to arrest you and charge you with a felony for engaging in your First Amendment right to assemble and protest.

(FactCheck.org calls this a “manufactured controversy” and dismisses the infringement of constitutional rights that this bill represents, but if we’ve learned nothing else about the Obama regime, it is that Obama and his cronies will use the letter of the law to take every inch of power they can.  Remember that the next time a US drone strike against some Jihadi terrorist kills that guy’s teenaged son instead.)

Lonsberry, in discussing the rally, announced today that he is not going to comply with the new law.  I take that to mean he is not going to register any “assault rifles” he possesses, and that he probably owns “high capacity” magazines for those weapons.  It could just mean that he owns a pistol capable of taking eight rounds in its magazine, of course.  That’s how absurd this horrible law is, and how awful the oppressive government of New York has become.

Bob acknowledged on air that he is guilty (or will be), in the eyes of New York State, of felony crimes. He further admitted that he could lose his job and his freedom over taking such a stand.  I have to admit that I don’t think it’s a good idea, if you intend to resist the law, to announce it to thousands of people.  I do, however, admire Lonsberry for taking this stand and for defending both his principles and the United States Constitution with, to paraphrase, his life, his property, and his sacred honor.

Good luck, Bob.  I wish I had your courage.

Thomas Harris, Knife Fighter’s Mange, and the Flicket

Graham looked thoughtfully at the marred muscular forearms, the dot of adhesive in the crook of the elbow, the shaved patch where Randy had tested the edge of his knife. Knife fighter’s mange.

I’m afraid of Randy. Fire or fall back.

“Did you hear me?” Randy said. “Butt out.”

Graham unbuttoned his jacket and put his identification on the table.

“Sit still, Randy. If you try to get up, you’re gonna have two navels.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Instant inmate sincerity.

“Randy, I want you to do something for me. I want you to reach in your left back pocket. Just use two fingers. You’ll find a five-inch knife in there with a Flicket clamped to the blade. Put it on the table. . . . Thank you.”

That prose belongs to Thomas Harris, whose 1981 book Red Dragon (which gave the world Dr. Hannibal Lecterl as a literary supervillain) also introduced me, as a young reader, to the “Flicket.”

Knife fighting lore from the Seventies and the early Eighties always fascinates me because it was just before I got into knives as weapons. The landscape of martial arts instruction was still recovering from an absurd “kung fu” boom in the Seventies that was as ridiculous as the Eighties ninja fad would become.  Publishing houses like Desert Publications, Loompanics, and others turned out a steady stream of pefectly ridiculous “knife fighting” junk, with lurid titles such as “Prison’s Bloody Iron” (a favorite of mine, by Jenks and Brown. Harold Jenks was very representative of the genre back then.)

By the late Eighties, tactical folding knives equipped for one-hand opening had yet to become widely known.  I bought my first Spyderco one-hand folder in the early 1990s, but as recently as 1993 or 1994, my daily carry was a Buck knife with a One Armed Bandit affixed to the blade.  The One Armed Bandit is a successor to the Flicket.  It’s just a screw-on thumb stud that lets you open the blade with only one hand.

The Flicket did it first and, while it’s a little clunkier than a thumb stud, something about it just screams 1970s martial nostalgia.  Harris’ Red Dragon brings that home nicely.  Back then, if you had a Flicket on your knife, you were the sort of fellow who kept his knife razor sharp and who tested it frequently by shaving hair off his forearm. You were, in short, a tough guy, or at least you thought you were.

I must be getting old.  Stuff like this puts a smile on my face.

 

Technocracy: Biden’s Dangerous Shotgun Advice

[Liberal] policies invariably harm the country and its people.

How can you tell when a lib is wrong about firearms? The answer is in my WND Technocracy column this week.

The short answer is that libs are lying whenever their mouths are moving.

Read the full column here in WND News.

Technocracy: Don’t Give Up Fighting Obama!

We are suffering because [Obama] is an incompetent fool who wants to rule every waking moment of your life.

I’ve been so depressed by the endless litany of bad news lately that I decided to write a column about it.  Someone else out there must know how I’m feeling.

It’s difficult even to avoid the news these days, but I wouldn’t advocate unplugging even if I could.  The fight is worth… well, fighting.

We might want to give up.

We might feel exhausted.

We might be tired of defeat after defeat, of bad news followed by more bad news.

We dare not stop.

Read the full column here in WND News.