Book promo…

Posted on by March 28, 2021

First up is Cedar Sanderson with a new novel- The East Witch

As always, click the cover for the Amazon link.

The blurb-

Anna’s rescue training kicked in when she tripped over the injured elf. Getting him home? No problem. Getting herself home again? That’s going to be a little more complicated.

Trapped Underhill, in the land of the fae, Anna has to remember everything she knows about fairy tales. Not the sweet happy ones: the stories where Baba Yaga boils you alive and giants grind your bones for bread. Her skills as a hunter and her good manners might be all that keep her alive. At least, if she can keep the Wild Hunt at bay!

Next up is Alma TC Boykin with another in the Familiar’s series- Malevolently Familiar

The blurb-

Caught between the Old Lands and the New . . .

Less than a month after confronting an ancient evil, Lelia Chan, her Familiar Tay, and their allies meet an unmovable object. Meister Gruenewald needs their help. A new danger rises across the Great Sea, one that requires more than just his knowledge and power.

What Lelia and Master Saldovado find in the Old Land triggers a race. Can the shadow mages and their Hunter allies bring a power-obsessed sorcerer to justice? Or will his twisted idea of paradise destroy all they have fought to protect? Light-side magic workers have tried to stop the sorcerer, and paid with their lives, struck down by a creature from Elsewhere. One with a grudge.

Worse than death awaits Lelia and her chosen family if they fail.

Next up, David Tatum with his third book in the Law of Swords series- In Division Imperiled 

The blurb-

THE LAW OF SWORDS: A set of laws written to prevent infighting among Svieda’s Royal Heirs in the event the King dies unexpectedly. One of these laws has never been needed… until now.

IN DIVISION IMPERILED
Divided by a war on two fronts, Svieda hopes to benefit from an expected reduction in hostilities that the upcoming winter snows will bring. With armies of hostile Porosian Elves in training, however, it cannot afford to pause its own operations, whatever the weather.

Euleilla soon finds herself defending the new military capital of Rocky Run from Poros’ Human armies while the bulk of her own forces are at large, scrambling for any advantage they can find against both of their enemies.

Meanwhile, Maelgyn has been called away on a secret mission by Wangdu and Phalra: Finding their uncle, who happens to have been one of Lord Ajiro’s greatest allies in the Ancient era. Is he going to be able and willing to help? And just where are all the Elves in this Elven sanctuary, after all?

Last but not least, John Van Stry with a nice little three book series- Days of Future Past: Part 1 Past Tense

The blurb-

Paul’s been having a bad day, perhaps one of the worst days he’s ever had. And now into the middle of all this, his instructor just got drafted by some mystical goddess to help save a world.

As for Paul? Well, he’s really not supposed to be there, and if he thought he was having a bad day before all of this, it just got worse, a lot worse. He’s now on a one way trip, forced to help a man who despises him while at the mercy of the world’s biggest trickster.

Gotta love the Icelanders…

Posted on by March 27, 2021

“Hey, what are you doing today?”

“Not much, just chillin’.”

“Wanna go see Fagradalsfjall? There’s supposed to be a party out there.”

“Sure!”

“Break out the Aquavit, looks like we’re going to be here a while…”

*Note- That IS a picture of the actual traffic jam of folks going out to look at the volcano. And no, Icelanders don’t get out much… 🙂

And some fantastic drone footage of the volcano from Bjorn Steinbekk!

And you can go HERE for a livestream of the volcano!

The volcano is about 8nm from Keflavik, so the folks TAD up there are getting some good views of it!

Logic…

Posted on by March 26, 2021

Some good points here…

1 – Eleven teens die each day because of texting while driving. Maybe it’s time to raise the age of Smart Phone ownership to 21.

2 – If gun control actually worked, Chicago would be Mayberry, USA.

3 – The Second Amendment makes more women equal than the entire feminist movement.

4 – Legal gun owners have 300 million guns and probably a trillion rounds of ammo. Seriously, folks, if we gun owners were the problem, you’d know it.

5 – When JFK was killed, nobody blamed the rifle. Not once!

6 – The NRA (National Rifle Association) murders 0 people and receives ($$$$ 0) nothing in government funds. Planned Parenthood kills 350,000 babies every year and receives $500,000,000 in tax dollars annually.

7 – I have no problem with vigorous background checks when it comes to firearms. While we’re at it, let’s do the same when it comes to immigration, Voter ID., and candidates running for office.

8 – Folks keep talking about another Civil War. One side knows how to shoot and probably has a trillion rounds. The other side has crying closets and is confused about which bathroom to use. Now tell me, how do you think that would end?

Indoctrination…

Posted on by March 25, 2021

Is why we are where we are today…

Why you may ask?

A far more troubling development, is how quickly a significant and powerful minority of Americans grew to believe that America is a fundamentally racist country and that white Americans are somehow uniquely evil by virtue of their birth.

<snip>

The short version is that American youth, since at least the 1960s, with significant acceleration in the 1980s, have been indoctrinated with hostility toward Western civilization in general, with the obvious corollaries of hostility toward whites, the nuclear family, Christianity, private property and men. Perhaps most troubling is the view that Western civilization and the aforementioned categories are uniquely evil and responsible for the lion’s share – if not all – of the world’s evil.

Full article, HERE at Ammo.com

Since I’m old enough to remember the 60s pretty well, this is MY perception of what happened…

The ‘center’ of the progressive left, in those days, was Bezerkley on the outskirts of Oakland. This was also the time period when drug use was peaking among the young (primarily marijuana with some LSD thrown in around the universities). This was also when Haight Ashbury became a community based upon counterculture ideals, drugs, and music. The first head shop, Ron and Jay Thelin’s Psychedelic Shop, opened on Haight Street on January 3, 1966, offering hippies a spot to purchase marijuana and LSD, which was essential to hippie life.

The combination of the two led to protests against the Vietnam War, Selective Service, and the military. Many on the left ran to Canada, got bogus deferments, or claimed to be gay to get out of military service.

The upshot was that while there were patriots, most of them were going in the military to keep from being drafted, while the left ‘managed’ to stay in school, wangling more deferments, staying in school longer to get masters and PHDs.

They also found they could feed off the government trough during the day as ‘educators’ while protesting/getting high/having ‘fun’ with the students at night. They also started taking over the teacher’s unions… A bit of history on those, HERE and HERE. Note the Communist influence in the NY teacher’s union going back to the 1920s…  And then there is the NEA, link HERE. And a current ‘example’ of professors, HERE.

The NEA, among others has been a political organization from the git go… Witness what is happening today Chicago, SFO, and other major cities over restarting in person schooling…

Anyhoo… The left got control of the education system starting in the 70s, and began indoctrinating the children, first in colleges, then in high school, and now all the way down to first grade.

IMHO, the schools have been dumbed down, social passing is now the ‘norm’ (can’t have anybody fail), everybody gets a ‘participation’ trophy, etc… And they have been indoctrinated day after day about how ‘bad’ the US is, its history, its capitalism, etc…

And now they’re going after math as being ‘white supremacy’ if you want to get the right answers… sigh…

I’m glad I’m old and won’t be around to see what happens next… But I will also admit ‘we’ were complacent. We were working hard at our jobs, based on the ethics we were raised with, to do better than our parents. And by and large we did… the cost was that we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to what our kids were being taught. And now we’re reaping that…

TBT…

Posted on by March 24, 2021

Remember when this was the view we had?

Now, although the left swears up and down walls don’t work…

Yet the ‘Biden-Harris’ administration (yes that’s the new name), is keeping the capital better protected than our southern border… And they continue to refuse to say there is a crisis down there, but there is STILL a crisis (unnamed) surrounding the capital…

What happened to my America??? The one I spent 20+ years defending???

Posted in TBT

And here we go…

Posted on by March 23, 2021

Biden’s original statement on the Boulder shooting-

“I want to be very clear. This is the one thing I do know enough to say on in terms of what’s happened there. While we are still waiting for more information regarding the shooter, his motive, the weapons he used, the guns, the magazines, the weapons, the modifications that apparently have taken place with those weapons involved here, I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps to save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Seante to act,” Biden said. “We can ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines in this country once again. I got that done when I was a Senator. It passed, it was the law for the longest time…we should do it again.”

“I’ll have much more to say as we learn more but I wanted to be clear,” he continued. 

And the update…

According to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Biden is considering executive action on gun control. 

“The way that he sees it is that there a number of levers that any president of the United States can use,” Psaki told reporters. “Including working through legislation, including executive action…there’s an ongoing process and I think we feel we have to work on multiple levels at the same time.”

Full article, HERE.

Of interest, the shooter is a Syrian Muslim who hated Trump and the US, and planned a Jihad, based on now scrubbed FB page… (amazing how quickly FB removed that)…

So the pre-planned narrative is falling apart already…

I really didn’t want live through Unintended Consequences… But it looks like we will.

Is anybody listening???

Posted on by March 19, 2021

I know I’ve discussed this before, but here are words from an expert from Toyota…

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Full article, HERE.

The 2017 study I’ve reference before says-

Now the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released a new study to try to better understand the needed charging infrastructure to support a larger fleet of electric cars.

They estimate that “approximately 8,500 strategically located fast-charge stations, with an average of three plugs each, are needed to provide a minimum level of national coverage for 7 million electric vehicles”.

But there is a ‘small’ problem here…

Combined number of vehicles in the USA including trucks, cars, semis, other is estimated to be around 250 MILLION vehicles. That would require over 300,000 charging stations!

Sigh…

First it was Etna…

Posted on by March 19, 2021

Now it’s Fagradalsfjall in Iceland! This is about 8nm from Keflavik!!!

The Icelandic Met Office has just reported that an eruption has begun at Fagradalsfjall, long expected to be the location of a possible volcanic eruption. This eruption is being called Geldingadalsgos, after Geldingardalur, the valley where the eruption is taking place.

Full article, HERE.  Now the real question is, will the Icelandic fire department get called in again???

Worth the read!!!

Posted on by March 19, 2021

Robert Bidinotto (author of the bestselling Dylan Hunter thriller series on Amazon) posted this on FB on the 15th… Bold is what caught my eye.

A BRIEF, OPTIMISTIC THOUGHT ABOUT CULTURAL CHANGE.
I have heard a great deal of despair lately about the state of our culture. Reading self-defined “cultural conservatives” (such as Rod Dreher) wailing that “all is lost,” it is easy to give in to pessimism.
Such pessimism seems warranted if you define the cultural battlefield in terms of *existing institutions.* After all, evidence of decadence and decline is pervasive within our political, economic, educational, entertainment, and social institutions. Most have become captives or accomplices of the left-nihilists.
But is that really the battlefield?
History reveals to me different lessons. Such as: how a Renaissance and Enlightenment can emerge from the tribalism and mysticism of the Dark Ages, in which all institutions were hopelessly corrupt and coercive. Or how America itself could emerge from the historic swamp of universal despotism.
We can learn from our enemies, too. The so-called “Frankfurt School” started as a mere school of thought — a bunch of Marxist professors in Germany. Ditto, the Fabian Socialists in the UK. We should study how they accomplished what they did, and take notes.
We also should take lessons from what the military calls “asymmetrical warfare”: how a small group of insurgents can fight a much larger, better equipped and supplied force to a stalemate — and even eventually beat them. (Study George Washington and Francis Marion, for examples.) No, I’m not being literal; I’m arguing that the military analogy applies to the cultural battlefield, too: the battle over ideas and values.
But creating new ideas, arguments, perspectives, and inspiring *visions* is not a numbers game. The creators of new ideas are always few, and usually solitary. Yet those few can eventually serve as navigators for an entire society. It was that truth that led Percy Shelley to say that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The same can be said of an influential religious leader, philosopher, or narrative artist: think Jesus, Aristotle, Homer. Throughout history, these visionaries have been the de facto “asymmetrical culture warriors” of the world.
Today, would-be asymmetrical culture warriors have access to technology, even at the individual level, that those earlier purveyors of ideas and values couldn’t have dreamed of — technological innovations that the military would call “force multipliers.” So, rather than gnash our teeth at the reach of mainstream- and social-media giants, or the influence of big corporations, schools, and governmental bodies, we “outsiders” can use technology to “hit them where they ain’t” — to spread our ideas and values in new forms, among receptive target audiences
This is way too big a topic for a Facebook post. But those of you with individualist perspectives in our collectivist era — especially, those of you in the storytelling arts — ought to think creatively about this. Above all, remember the unstoppable power of a captivating idea or perspective — and the fact that it takes only a single creative visionary to give it life in the world.
As authors, we have choices to make. I, for one, will continue to write the best stories with the best characters I can, and will not bow to the cancel culture and other ‘mavens’ of current literature out there.

Back when…

Posted on by March 19, 2021

Humor was acceptable…

And both sides could sit down and enjoy dinner and entertainment…