Words Of Wisdom

Change the threads title.

The hammer will pound all day but the arm gets tired. RR

Really?? Then HOW do u define wisdom ??

Wisdom is found in a moment's instant and forgotten. rr

That's what that swishing sound was.....

Four years ago, Chris Cheng—a Chinese-Japanese-Cuban-American
Google employee—started watching Top Shot, a History Channel
reality show where contestants shoot their way through a series
of complex competitions. Cheng, who as a kid had sometimes gone
shooting with his Navy veteran father, started getting into the show.

One day, while watching season two with some of his Google
coworkers, Cheng told them: "Hey, everyone, this is gonna sound
crazy, but I think I'm going to apply for Top Shot." He remembers his
colleagues thinking he was nuts. "They looked at me like, 'You barely shoot,
you don't have any accolades or trophies or awards or anything in the
shooting world. What makes you think you'd even stand a chance with
some of these lifelong, seasoned professional marksmen?' "

But Cheng had a sense of what he could do. He'd been going to the
range and hitting his marks; the best way to put his skills to the test,
he figured, was to sign up and try out. He got in. Then he beat out
veterans, police officers, and an Olympic shooter en route to winning
that season's competition. The first thing he did after his victory was take
some of the $100,000 prize money and upgrade his National Rifle Association
membership to lifetime status.

Then, last year, Cheng took to his blog to announce he was gay.
This wasn't a surprise to his friends and family: Cheng and his boyfriend
had been together for four and a half years. But he wanted people
to see that gun owners were a diverse set of people—and who better
than a gay, racially diverse, tech-geek-turned-champion-marksman
to deliver the message?

In April, Cheng officially signed on as a news commentator for the NRA.
This past month, the group released its first video starring Cheng,
in which he offers an explainer on the fighting in Ukraine before
launching into a case for protecting gun owners from government
intrusion. "I think that this is an opportunity for the NRA and our
community to accurately portray the diversity that already exists
in the community," Cheng told me, of his new gig. "We've allowed some
prevailing stereotypes to take hold, and we're not challenging them."

Cheng might be the most prominent gay marksman at the moment,
but he's not alone. Websites and communities tailored to gay gun
enthusiasts include the Pink Pistols, Big Gay Al's Big Gay (Gun) Blog,
and GaysWithGuns.net, which features a sexy, stubbled man
brandishing a semiautomatic. The website used to pose the
provocative question of what would have happened to Matthew Shepard
had he been trained to use a gun—though that was removed after too
many people objected, and it was replaced with a quote from the
Dalai Lama: "If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you … it would
be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." Self-defense
was one of the reasons Marc Whittemore, a Los Angeles-based designer,
started the website, but it was also partly to show that "it's not just
Christian, redneck, Bible-thumping old white men that are pro-gun."

The Pink Pistols are probably the most prominent group of gay gun
enthusiasts. The organization began 14 years ago, when Jonathan
Rauch (a contributing editor at National Journal) wrote an article for
Salon arguing that gay people should receive firearms training and arm
themselves so they could defend against hate crimes. Not only would
they be protecting themselves from violence, he wrote, but they
could change the way both straight and gay people viewed them:
Guns, Rauch argued, could "emancipate them from their image—often
internalized—of cringing weakness. Pink pistols, I'll warrant, would do far
more for the self-esteem of the next generation of gay men and women
than any number of hate-crime laws or anti-discrimination statutes."

One libertarian activist in Boston, Doug Krick, took inspiration from
Rauch's piece. Soon he and his friends were forming a group to go to
the shooting range together. Their organization—the Pink Pistols—got
a lot of media coverage, and before long, others from around the
country were calling to start chapters in their states.

"We teach the public that we know how to do this, and you don't know
what gay persons out there might be Pink Pistols and might be able
to defend themselves," says Gwen Patton, who speaks for the national
organization. "Rather than saying, 'We're here, we're queer, we're in
your face,' our thing is, 'We're queer, yeah, that's fine, look at the ways
we're similar rather than that one way we're different, but if you
absolutely can't bring yourself to do that, we're going to ask you very
forcefully not to try to harm us.' "

Wisdom is found at a later date... rr

It sure looks like it.

The blind are led by rather the scent of butt instead of the sight thereof...

That is just too easy. Please think of your own insult.

Between love and sex, only one requires respect. rr

Wisdom is the child of enlightenment... rr

Wisdom is the child of enlightenment... rr


Any relation?

wisdom is a generous heart

That is beautiful CI thx

Yesterday is a whisper and tomorrow is a roar... rr

I am proud to be an "infidel" if it means that I think for myself... rr

Never confuse the empirical with the historical. rr