A Better Photo

1. Because I'm vain.
2. Because "Black Cars Look Better in the Shade," as do black shirts with white graphics.

http://shiningpearlsofsomething.blogspot.com/2011/07/ta-da-i-am-such-rebel.html

3. Because you can see my awesome new earrings!

http://silverandstone.blogspot.com/2011/06/steampunk-earrings.html

Ta-Da!!! I Am SUCH a Rebel!

My first political t-shirt.  If you want one, contact Sean.

http://ncguns.blogspot.com/2011/07/gunwalker-t-shirt-sales-reopens.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AnNcGunBlog+%28An+NC+Gun+Blog%29

(Just in case you can't read it: "Am I the only person on the planet that didn't get guns from the ATF?")
To be clear, I'm not anti-Law Enforcement.  Most of you know that my dad's a retired cop who taught criminal justice, and my sister is a Fed.  I am pro- Law Enforcement, not law-breaking.  There is a special place in hell for cops who blatantly break the law, shame the profession, and get other cops killed.  

I'll be wearing this to the county fair this week.  Should I ask SisterFed to give me a heads-up if my name shows up on the terrorist watch list?  Y'all know how dangerous I am, advocating for my constitutional rights and wishing I could take them for granted.

Oh!  And just so you know I'm still the same old Suz behind the ideology:  Not a bad hair day, eh?  And look!  I've lost 10 pound in the last two  months; my gut is markedly smaller than my boobs!  YAY!

E-mail From a Real Live Celebrity!

The other day I sent Cindy Gerard my previous two posts, and she answered! How cool was that?
******
Hi Suzy

Thanks for writing, and I appreciate the 'pilgrimage' you had to
make to find the book.

As for the career advice ... um ... wow.  Vince Flynn I am not - although
I'm a huge fan.  I am a romantic suspense author.  It's my niche.  And even
if it weren't also my bread and butter, it would still be what I choose to
write.

BTW: If you would like to be notified when a new book comes out, please sign up for my newsletter if you haven't already. http://www.cindygerard.com/lists/?p=subscribe

Thanks again,
Cindy

******


Rather gracious, I thought, since neither post was dripping with flattery...

Dear Cindy Gerard,

(since I don't write fan letters.)  About that book, "With No Remorse." you're in the wrong genre; get the hell out.  Save yourself!  Once again, you grabbed me by the throat and dragged me into what might have been a great book.  Then you took your male lead character and turned his brain to mush.  Previously in the series, he was my favorite character, and when the bad guys critically wounded him in the last book, I was afraid you might kill him off.  You may as well have done so, because he apparently never recovered.  You could have done so much more to develop his personality.  Oh well.  Your action sequences, while pretty good, were not your best.  Then, again even you would have a hard time topping  Lang's and Reed's explosions and narrow escapes.

Here's the thing.  You write romantic suspense pretty well, but you write action/adventure even better.  Your talent is phenomenal, but I think this genre is holding you back.  The "internal conflicts" within and between your characters aren't very interesting or original.  You do touch on some some insights that show promise, but you don't develop them.  It's more like you merely mention them.  Your "external conflicts" that move the plot and force the issues, however, are fantastic!  Your minute-by minute action, narrated at times in the voice of the characters, keeps me laughing out loud and on the edge of my seat.  So here's a thought:  how about instead of writing weak romances with lots of "things that go boom," maybe you should write "things that go boom" stories, liberally laced with romance.  Or hell, just lust, with the maybe some potential for romance.

I will read "Last Man Standing" when it comes out, and I suspect it will be more of the same: worth the eight bucks, but not something I would recommend to the library ladies.

The publishing industry is collapsing under the weight of the mediocre, "safe" garbage it generates.  It doesn't like authors who take risks and write fresh new stories, but its customers DO like such authors.  Here's what I would like to see you do.  Turn down that contract for your next series.  Say to your publisher, "Thanks, but no thanks.  I'm going to write a book now.  I'm going to write it on my timetable, not your deadline.  I'm going to edit it for content, not word count.  If my story doesn't follow a guaranteed formula, I'll write it my way.  When I'm finished, I'll submit it to you (presuming you're still in business.)  You already know it will be good, and you know my readers will buy it, so you may want to go out on a limb and publish it.  If you don't, someone else will.  Don't call me, I'll call you."

_________________________

...and now, back to my regularly scheduled life of dishes, laundry and litter pans.

Finally! And What Crappy Timing!

I've been waiting for the release of "With No Remorse," the new Cindy Gerard trashy novel, the last (I think) in a pretty decent series.   I didn't get to sleep til late last night, and I woke up an hour early this morning so I could buy it on my way to work.  At the library.  Go figure; they didn't order it.  Kroger, WalMart, and CVS didn't have it, so I went again after work.  WalMart - no.  The woman stocking new books said she got 6 copies last week and they're gone, plus I'm the second person today who asked about it.  "Must be a good book."  (No, it had better be a good book!)  CVS - nope.  Kroger - YES!!!  So I'm tired and I'm going to stay up late tonight anyway.  I'm also behind on my blog reading.

Cindy Gerard is my favorite guilty pleasure; mostly I read non-fiction, and occasionally historical fiction.  I don't know how technically accurate she really is with "things that go BOOM,"  but she makes an honest effort, and has a team of experts she consults.  Her characters don't have a lot of depth and of course her plots are delightfully unlikely - a few days of non-stop adrenaline fueled action and adventure in exotic locales.  This is, of course, a good backdrop for the kind of romantic relationships we all know last a lifetime.  The pace is fast, the dialog is fairly realistic (judging by the new Nora Roberts, which I couldn't finish *ugh!* she's been reading Gerard too!) and the sex, certainly graphic, matches the rest of the stories in tone.  There's an art to that; I generally am embarrassed by sex scenes in novels.  Too many silly euphemisms appropriate only to historical bodice-rippers, or too clinical and cold.  AWKWARD!   Of course the women are too pretty and the men are too buff-n-handsome.  And the men are all painfully honorable, even though they're a team of former military "Black Ops" mercenaries...  The first book was pretty good, #'s 2 and 3 were non-stop roller coaster rides, # 4 was almost as good, but # 5 was a bit of a letdown - too much backstory, not enough immediate action.

I'll let you know how # 6 fares; the male lead is one of my favorite characters.  I'll be back in a day or so!

Yes, I Bought One

http://ncguns.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-wants-gunwalker-t-shirt.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AnNcGunBlog+%28An+NC+Gun+Blog%29

Thank you, Sean, at "An NC Gun Blog."  Excellent blog, plus, "Sean D. Sorrentino" is , like, the coolest name ever!  Not that I'm biased by my Irish/Italian heritage or anything.  (And Sean, if you're not Italian, sorry, but it certainly has that ring to it!)

This purchase is so me.  My "mad money" budget is $40 a week, and since I divide $20 of it between four animal rescues, people tend to think I'm some sort of hippie.  Yeah.  Peace, love and fuzzy puppies, man; that's all anybody really needs, right?  Heh heh heh.

Birthers. Still? Really?

I saw a couple of recent polls showing that around 20% of Americans still believe that Obama was not born in the U.S.  I do hope that number has dropped in the last few weeks, but I have my doubts.  I have to wonder if the average birther knows how this bullshit started, and who really got the ball rolling?  Do these people even know that they are disciples of  Mr. Conspiracy himself, Philip Berg (and FoxNews, of course.)  This is a man who wants us to believe that the CIA detonated strategically placed explosives in federal buildings around Manhattan on September 11. (Because, of course, the CIA knew all bout the terrorist plot, and wanted to take advantage of it.  No, really!  It's true!  It's so true!)  Berg subscribes to the theory that if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, it's a realistic scenario.  You say you have evidence disproving a conspiracy?  Talk to the hand, the face is not listening.  If the chances are one in a million, he expects you to believe it happened.   I'll bet he buys a LOT of lottery tickets, and so do the folks who believe him.

This is the evidence provided by Berg and his ilk, the "truth" of what happened; it's the basis of the entire birther movement:

1.  Step-Grandmother Sarah Obama admitted in a taped telephone interview that Obama was born in Kenya, and she was present.  The Birther leaders presented as evidence, the first 5 minutes of that interview.

* The rest of the interview shows quite clearly that there was mistranslation, misinterpretaion, and therefore misunderstanding of the questions, and possibly the answers.  Later in the interview, Sarah states clearly that Obama was born in Hawaii.  It has also been documented that several months later, she received a letter announcing his birth.  I suspect the average birther doesn't know about the last part of the interview, and only got the edited YouTube version.  The Birther leaders (experts in conspiracy, you know) want the rest of us to believe that that part was just a fast talking-conspirator backpedaling to cover her slip up.  After all, amidst everything else, she did say, through her interpreter, "She was present when he was born."  Hey.  Just try to disprove it.  It could have happened, therefore it happened.  And the birth announcement?  Cover-up.  Absolutely.

2. Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, took a days-old infant on a trans-Atlantic flight to Hawaii, registered his birth, and planted fake birth announcements in two newspapers.  You will note that the birth announcements *gasp* do not list the place of birth!!!!!  See?  See?  This really could have happened!

{There's a further obfuscation going on here as well.  Many birthers are ignorant enough to believe that Obama's citizenship was at issue.  They honestly believe that if he was born in Kenya, he's not an American citizen.  And that, of course, would all the motivation Ann needed  to fake the documentation.  All kinds of opportunities are forbidden to non-citizens.  (You see, they know that pregnant Mexican girls sneak across the border to give birth all the time, so that their babies are eligible for U.S.citizenship.)  These people don't know that his parents's nationality is what established his citizenship, not his place of birth.  And no, he does not have dual citizenship.  He did as a child, due to British/Kenyan law, but Kenya doesn't allow dual citizenship for adults.  Obama lost any claim he might have had to Kenyan citizenship in his early twenties, but he has been an American citizen since the day he was born.}

3.  He lived in Indonesia for a while, and supposedly became a citizen.  Barely worthy of mention, and totally untrue.  But again, some people believe it.

So basically, even the "intelligent" ("intelligent" not being synonymous with "rational" and "well-informed") birthers continue to propose this theory:

An 18 year old American white girl, married to and pregnant by a black man in 1960, spent the last days of her pregnancy carefully plotting a conspiracy that would ensure her child's eligibility to become President of the United States.  Not merely to ensure that he was a U.S. citizen, but to ensure that he could qualify for the only opportunity on the planet that required him to be a natural born citizen.  *Was this chick psychic?  In 1960,  people in the U.S.were still being lynched over interracial marriage.  If little Barry were raised in any state whiter than Hawaii, that little halfbreed could have "disappeared" on his way home from school if he walked through the wrong neighborhood!*

I would add that in 1960, prenatal medicine hadn't quite reached today's level of sophistication.  Premature births were much more common, even among healthy white women.  Ann wanted her baby to eligible for the presidency, yet she was in Kenya late in her pregnancy.  She was apparently  smart enough to commit all kinds of fraud to indicate that her child was "natural born," but she wasn't smart enough to get on a damn plane sooner, to guarantee that her child was "natural born."

So there you have it.  Ann Dunham, no doubt with the help of her family, was a brilliant, possibly even psychic, criminal mastermind.  Suspend all logic, context, history, and common sense, and you too can actually believe this fairy tale, based on physically possible (but never produced) evidence.  Of course, all evidence was destroyed by the conspirators.

20%  of Americans still eat this shit up.  And get this!  Back in February, Karl Rove said this on FoxNews: 




Said Rove: "Within our party, we've got to be very careful about allowing these people who are the birthers and the 9/11-deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record straight."

When asked what percentage of Republican voters were birthers -- a recent poll found 51% -- Rove added: "I don't know, but whatever it is, it ought to be less, because we need the leaders of our party to say 'Look, stop falling into the trap of the White House and focus on the real issues."

                                 -----------------------------------------------------

"The trap of the White House?"  The White House is behind the birther movement?  The White House is using the birther movement to distract us from the "real issues???"  When the hell did the White House get that much influence over FoxNews?

2 of ever 10 people you know, genuinely think this is all perfectly logical.  And what's worse, those same people think that only a raving-commie-liberal "Obamabot" would ever disagree with them!  20%  Really?

Conspiracy theories are a lot like religion.

More on FOX, kinda...

I'm not a big fan of Truthout; like many agenda-driven organizations, it stre-e-e-e-e-tches the truth pretty damn thin to suit its bias.
 http://www.truth-out.org/14-propaganda-techniques-fox-news-uses-brainwash-americans/1309612678

This article is a bit wordy, and rather vague in spots, but it highlights some striking truths.  Of course, all news media organizations use same techniques in varying degrees, and many do so with frightening subtlety.   Since I'm intellectually lazy, and a big fan of simplicity, I appreciate how easy it is to single out FOX's ludicrous brand of propaganda.  Nothing subtle there!  It would be laughable, except that, as patently obvious as it is,  millions of people fall for it daily.  Just because it's the kettle calling the pot black, doesn't mean the pot is mauve.



It's also preaching to the choir.  Since it's rather long and somewhat intellectual, most FoxFanatics will never see it.

I recently read this quote:  “God created man in His image and ever since man has been trying to return the favor.”  I wondered if it was a liberal Christian commenting on conservative Christianity.  Turns out is was a conservative Christian commenting on liberal Christianity.  Hmm.  Funny how that works.


It's not any single agenda that will destroy us; it's blind devotion to an agenda.  To me, this concept encourages thought and promotes rational opinions.   To many, it just makes me a hand-wringing fence-sitter.  I guess I can live with a few splinters in my ass.