Shadow Army

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

I did a bit on the Barrett Brief this morning, talking politics and Shadow Army and as we discussed things, I went on a little mini-rant about what needs to be done with popular culture. What I said, boiled down, is that we can’t win unless we win the culture. Win all the elections you want, but if the culture is far left, far left will be the country. What I urged in response to that was this: if you’ve got an idea for a book, a movie, a song or a piece of art – DO IT. Don’t be afraid. I was terrified of putting out Mirrors. Afraid that people wouldn’t like it. Forget that. Just put it out there: give people what you have. Maybe you aren’t the great artist…but if you’ve got something to say, in whatever medium, say it. We need to flood the zone.

As those who have read so far know, what I’ve written is a story about normal, good people thrust into strange circumstances – but the key to it all is that they are normal, good people. Not perfect people, but not tortured super heroes with shameful pasts they are unable to come to terms with. Even when I set a character on a path to sin (Jerome, most especially – for a bit of a spoiler to those who have read only to, say, Battles at this time, he keeps on living; he’s in Book 7), the prospect of redemption is always there. The good guys are believers in God and in doing what is right even when it is hard. The books are family friendly (I’d say 12 and up); there is a tiny bit of salty language, but not much. No gross sexual scenes and even in the battle scenes, I don’t try to gross people out with gore. There is no woke SJW preaching. This is the sort of thing which we need to produce and keep producing until it starts to make its way into the general public. Maybe my books will mostly stay on shelves. No problem. But that its out there might inspire the next guy and maybe that will be the blockbuster which opens up the dam and allows a flood of socially conservative popular culture to flow.

Related: they are making a 5th Indiana Jones movie. With 78 year old Harrison Ford as the star. It is ridiculous. And this is really our opportunity. Not only is the Left out of ideas, but even when the recycle their old ideas, they are now injecting them with whatever is fashionable. I’ve finally binge-watched The Walking Dead and I’m on the last season…where we’ve now got a deaf character. I mean, seriously: how could a deaf person survive a Zombie apocalypse? The only way you can survive, at minimum, is hearing them coming so you can kill them or move away before they bite you. But you gotta have it, along with the gay and lesbian couples because, sure as heck, as the world ends what people will care about is making sure the last fads of the dead world keep going. I’m expecting the upcoming final season to add a few more SJW box-check characters. All we need at the start is something that is merely fun.

Joe Biden went to meet Putin for Lord only knows what reason – the whole world knows that Biden is senile and feeble and thus there is no hard center to American government. We’re getting bad policy, but that is more by accident…Biden’s aides are running the country, turning the crank at different times and at different speeds and what flows out was a mish-mash of liberal twaddle but even in that, there is no direction.

Inflation is rising fast and the Fed is saying they’ll jack up rate in 2023. It’ll be sooner than that, I bet, though 2023 would be best for us as it would create a 2024 recession just about assuring a GOP landslide. They get to pick their poison – jack up rates and send us into a tailspin, or hold off and watch inflation spike to 10% or more per year. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of useless clowns.

Cocaine Mitch promises to block Biden’s judicial appointments if he becomes Majority Leader. Never get too mad at Mitch. Sure, he’s Deep State and Establishment…but he knows how to play hardball on the things which matter to us.

Hungary bans LGBT content for minors. This is fighting the Culture War.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Been busy writing!

Shadow Army is now ready for pre-order on Kindle. The paperback will release June 15th. Around December 15th, Book 5 will come out – Kings and Queen, which completes the two-book set with Shadow Army. And then, in 2022, two more will come out, Book 6 and 7 which will complete the entire series.

I’ve been thinking about the slogan “black lives matter” and it works out to an egregious insult: it is a claim that black lives never mattered until a drug addict resisted arrest. Ain’t having it: black lives have always mattered.

They’re now admitting what Trump said at the start: Covid came out of the lab. Now there are two questions to answer:

  1. Was it a manufactured virus?
  2. Did the Chinese deliberately spread it around once it got out to ensure the whole world took the hit?

The government of the People’s Republic of China is a stain on the world and the enemy of human decency. We should break all trade relations and forbid travel between our countries.

Creepy Joe Biden remains creepy.

Senile Joe Biden also remains senile.

If you want to get good, solid, down the middle political analysis, you’re going to have to go on Twitter and follow Varad Mehta. I don’t always agree with him, but everything he says is worth listening to and you’ll always come away knowing more than you did before.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Getting close to release for Shadow Army!

We should have it ready for release in a few days – gotta rush it up as we’re going on vacation the 2nd week of June and the Mrs, already reading Battles, wants it for beach reading material!

I was talking to Matt the other day in connection with this and we did ponder the prospect of doing a follow-up on Worst President. We rejected the idea because we both found that we didn’t care about Joe Biden. He’s not worthy of anyone’s attention, really: a senile cipher for the Ruling Class.

The State-sanctioned racism the Left is trying to impose on us is getting a lot of pushback. This is just one of many such efforts. Critical Race Theory might be the hill the Left dies on – they are committed to it, now. They can’t back away and don’t want to – but it is a monstrous outrage against basic human decency. We can push them over the edge with it.

Teen Vogue had an article up about how you can use menstrual blood for your magic incantations. Think about that. It is 2021 and Teen Vogue is telling little girls that they can be witches. Party of Science, y’all.

Team Obama is putting out a nonsense story claiming that Michelle Obama was the target of racism all the time while she was First Lady. This is the sort of drivel they’re putting out these days to justify their White Supremacist Threat Narrative. But, do keep this in mind: the audience for this isn’t you and me. We know it’s bull as much as those putting it out do. The audience is urban/suburban wine mom Democrat voters. To keep them believing that they are engaged in a desperate battle to keep racism at bay.

Make America Disco Again

Mark Noonan17 Comments

War in the Middle East. Gas shortages. All we need is a bit of inflation (which is coming) and for Biden’s brother to make beer and we’re back in the 1970’s.

At least we might get some cool music again:

Sorry I didn’t write for a week! Was just finishing the final draft of Shadow Army. Have that out in a couple weeks. It picks up our heroes 6 years after Battles.

As to that war in the Middle East – it is happening because the Palestinian leadership was ordered to do it by Iran. Iran, in turn, ordered it done because they want our attention on that while they take Team Biden to the cleaners in return for a revived Iran Deal, which will be even worse than the last one. The Iranians are able to do this, I think, partially with the active connivance of part of Team Biden, partially because the rest of Team Biden is simply too stupid to see the game.

For those who know what they’re doing, I really have no explanation for their fervent desire to appease Iran. It doesn’t even make bad sense as our wartime alliance with Stalin did. The Iranian regime long ago forfeited the support of the Iranian people. Iran is a basket case of a nation. Let them fall apart – and then once the Mullahs are out, work a deal with their successors. But the foreign policy elite has it in their mind that we must sustain the Mullahs. Even outright bribery doesn’t explain thinking this is something to do (the Saudis – Iran’s deadly enemies – would pay more for a different policy line).

CDC says you can drop the masks if vaccinated (I am – first shot, bit of a sore arm; second shot, crying like a little girl my arm hurt so much…but in 36 hours I was fine). This whole thing has been drivel from start to finish. It was a bad flu, nothing more.

They are doing an audit of Maricopa County, AZ – and they are finding discrepancies. I doubt, though, they’ll find enough to be decisive: those who conducted the steal have had more than enough time to destroy evidence. And its not like Biden’s DOJ will be coming after anyone who broke the law. I honestly have my doubts that Biden even topped 65 million votes. They really stuffed the ballot boxes this time – they wanted to be sure he got over 50%. But, even then, they underestimated how big Trump’s vote would be, especially in the Battlegrounds – that’s why they had to stop counting for a bit, manufacture some more ballots, and then stuff them in to shove Biden over the EC top by 42,000 votes. That is how close a shave it was – just that many votes the other way, and Trump would still be in.

I know this makes some people certain we can never win again – but the bottom line is that in the GOP controlled areas, reforms are being enacted which will make it vastly harder to cheat. Remember, in 2000 Gore’s attempt to steal Florida led to weeks of controversy. In 2020, the State was called for Trump 17 minutes after the polls closed in the panhandle (not, though, by the major networks – they delayed that call for a long time because they needed to call AZ for Biden before or right around same time to give the impression of a Biden win). That is the difference between a State where Dems can stuff a ballot box and a State where they can’t. There has been much hang wringing about the future of the GOP in Texas – but not from me. The reason it has gotten closer is not because Latinos have been moving in (TX hasn’t had a white majority in ages) but because in the deep blue areas of Texas (and there are some big ones, like Austin), the Democrats have been stuffing the ballot box. But that will now become harder. As I’ve been saying for ages, the best defense against fraud isn’t voter ID (though that helps), but requiring precincts to report their total number of votes within 30 minutes of closure. Once that number is locked in, you can’t stuff…puts a huge handicap because no matter how much data is crunched, no Democrat really knows what turnout will be in the deep Red areas until the vote comes in.

The GOP nominee for Virginia’s Lt Governor is a black woman who rips to shreds Critical Race Theory. More of this, please. My view: CRT must become illegal in the United States. Yes, I know this would take an Amendment…but it is such a poison that the Republic must vomit it out entirely.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan36 Comments

I hope you guys like my fiction more than my non-fiction…because I’m definitely liking fiction more! Nearly done with Battles, the sequel to Secrets (last night I did a big bit on the final battle between the good guys and the bad guys; its quite exciting!) and I’m already way into Shadow Army, which takes our heroes six years after Battles and continues the story. Shadow Army came up because the Mrs invented the evil creatures in it…she just suddenly thought about them and before I knew it, I had 25,000 words down.

The Democrats and the MSM (but I repeat myself) are sticking to the 2016 script relentlessly. They are even now on “GOP insiders say Trump is looking for a graceful exit and a symbolic win”. Hey, who knows? Maybe they’re on to something this time…but I suspect they are just churning out what they are told to churn out by the DNC.

I’m thinking we need to ban political polling: just get rid of it. It doesn’t inform any more, if it ever did. It is now a mere tool to drive a Narrative and try to convince people that reality is different from what they can see right in front of them. If we did that, then the Experts would actually have to go out and see what’s happening before they could tell us what they think is going on. Now, they just refer to the polls and call it a day – and call you an idiot if you don’t respect the Holy Polls.

Trump’s White House speech as called a “peaceful protest in favor of law and order”…and as we know peaceful protests can’t spread the ‘Rona, it was all good. And it was also pretty amazing: mostly because of the number of “Blexit” people involved (Black Exit: black people leaving the Democrats. We’ll see how that comes out: there are some indicators that Trump will score pretty high in minority communities. But, unlike the Experts, I think I’ll wait for the votes to be cast and counted before deciding what will happen.

Joe says we voters “don’t deserve” to know his views on court packing. Which, of course, means we know: he’ll pack it in an instant if given the chance. But, it doesn’t poll well: it really is just a tiny minority of really butt hurt liberals upset that Trump got to appoint 3, so they want to appoint 4. Joking aside, it is a danger to the Republic because if they did pack it to a 7/6 liberal majority, that Court would rule any way the Democrats wanted at the moment. Better to avoid that by keeping Trump in the White House and Cocaine Mitch running the Senate. This issue is causing some heartburn for Democrats – in both the AZ and CO Senate races, the GOP incumbents scored pretty heavily in debate by getting both their Democrat opponents to refuse to answer the question. I just have to think that voters aren’t going to like this “you don’t deserve to know” attitude. Could make some tight races flip our way.

Seems like the kooks set up by the FBI in the “kidnap Whitmer” scheme have one thing in common: they don’t like Trump. No surprise: real 2A, Conservative militia types are law-abiding patriots. We will fight if our lives and liberty depend on it, but we’re not lunatics…you know, like liberals are. My view of this is that the FBI got wind of these losers and then egged them on until they broke a law…all so they could blame Trump. As far as that goes, it worked: to the end of time, liberals will assert that MAGA-hatted Trumpsters plotted to kidnap Whitmer.