Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Let Europe Burn: The Murder of Alfie Evans

The more I look at Europe, the more I think it would look pretty whilst on fire.

For the past twenty years, I've watched Europe fall apart. I saw the EU throw their entire Christian history under the bus in the vain hope of some bright sparkling secularist future. I've seen Europe disrespect their elders to death. I've seen them disrespect the dead by either turning them to fertilizer or just keeping them on ice while the family went on vacation. I've watched Muslims drive Jews out of Europe and have their own pogrom of gays.

I figured that there was always some measure of hope for them. It's not like they were going to murder people, right? There were no boxcars.

Then there's Alfie Evans.

At the time of this post (4/25/18, 9:30AM Eastern) Alfie is only 23 months old. He entered the hospital in December 2016 due to a chest infection that caused chronic seizures, eventually leaving him reliant on a ventilator. The UK doctors can't be bothered to give him a real diagnosis, but his doctors say he suffers from a rare and incurable degenerative neurological condition.

The UK doctors just gave up on him. They wanted to pull his feeding tube and pull the plug on his life support.

Meanwhile, Italy and the Vatican have offered to continue his treatment and try to save him. They offered to pay for the costs. They offered to grant the family citizenship. They offered everything you'd think that a caring parent would offer, only this time it was to a total stranger.

The UK courts said that Alfie couldn't be taken out of the country. It was in the child's best interest that he simply die. At least one decision said that Alfie couldn't even be allowed to go home with his parents, because the parents were a flight risk, and might DARE to do something as simple and as straightforward as GETTING THEIR SON TREATMENT SO HE CAN LIVE.

But nope, the UK has gone full statist. Any rights the little people have are granted to them by the state, and can be taken away at any time, for any whim.

As of the writing of this post, Alfie has been taken off of life support, but he's a stubborn child, and is breathing on his own. He will not go quietly. So, the UK doctors have, in their wisdom, decreed that he will not be fed, nor given anything to drink, and will starve him to death.

I'm afraid that if Alfie lives too much longer on his own, without support from the UK doctors, they will simply go in and smother him with a pillow. No, this is not hyperbole on my part. I expect them to straight out murder him if he doesn't die quickly enough on his own.

Meanwhile, the Leftist douchebags in America, who constantly point to Britain's National Health Service with praise, declaring it THE model for nationalized health care, are dead silent. After all, why should they say anything? They're hoping that little Alfie will die quietly, the news story will slip away, and everyone will forget he even existed.

Don't worry, Lefties, Alfie has already gone into my current book project. You'll be seeing him again.

I'm certain that someone out there will consider this an anomaly, that it's not important for the future. That this isn't worrisome at all.

Please keep in mind the real world incident of the "children's summer camp" for the disabled and the handicapped, the retarded / autistic / et al. Over time, they would be euthanized, their bodies cremated, and there would be a letter sent back to their parents, explaining that their child had contracted a form of meningitis, and the body had to be burned for health reasons. The letters of condolences would be staggered, so that it didn't look too suspicious. Eventually, a Cardinal became suspicious because too many families had this happen to them. Him and his secretary looked into this summer camp, and they didn't come back. They had disappeared both of them.

If you're thinking that this story is "obviously about Nazis," you'd be wrong. This did take place in Germany, but not under Hitler. No, this took place in the 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, about a decade before Hitler came to power. It was under Weimar's eugenics program. For the good of the state, the children were put down, and anyone who looked too closely were treated like criminals.

For the good of the state, Alfie Evans was sentenced to die, and his parents treated like criminals.

But this is the world that Europeans created. This is the world that they've voted to build. It is a world where the state owns them, and they live and die depending on what the state ALLOWS them to have. Which is funny, England used to be part of the "free world." Now they're barring law abiding citizens from leaving for the continent, lest their precious nationalized, single-payer health program be shown up for the freak show that it is.

They voted to give their rights away, and now, they're reaping the consequences.

No, I do not see Europe learning from this. I don't see them changing their ways. I see the laws that murder Alfie Evans be codified and locked into place. Then I see the lawmakers double down on these laws, making it illegal for parents in Alfie's position to even sue the doctors or NHS -- perhaps just skip straight to denying all medical services to anyone who doesn't recover from a condition X-serious in Y-weeks.

This is the world that they built. Barring a miracle, it will not change. While I believe in miracles, I'm not certain about the efficacy of a miracle like this if no one would accept it.

This is what the people of Europe wanted. It will eventually kill them. By the time they figure it out, it'll be too late.


(UPDATED 10:36 AM, EASTERN, 4/25/18: Alfie's doctors, after trying to starve him to death for nearly 28 hours, have deigned to resume feeding him. I would congratulate these butchers on doing something as strange and as outlandish as FEEDING A HUNGRY CHILD, but Alfie's father had talked to the press about how "they wouldn't do this to an animal." I admit that this child, who isn't even two years old yet, has lasted so long without life support, food and water. Alfie may yet live out of pure stubbornness. Assuming the UK doctor's don't murder him in his sleep, when no one is watching.)

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

The Planetary Awards are coming to a close



Please remember that this one is still here, and all votes must be in by the end of April

This one is a book blogger's award. They have two categories: short and long. Click on this link for the instructions on how to vote from your blog onto their award.

But yeah, if you have a blog and write about books, knock yourselves out.

....  I should probably vote for this as well. Oops.


It's going to be interesting. I don't know an awful lot about the award. And, since the book was pulled for rerelease by Silver Empire, campaigning would be odd. I don't think my publisher would appreciate me handing out ARCs of the book before he gets to edit a new version.

Oh, and while I think about it, I'm also up against Nick Cole and Robert Kroese. So, I'm going to need all the help I can get.

So, the Planetary Awards are in for the best SFF stories of 2017.  Anyone who has a blog, podcast, or YouTube account can vote. 

Which is most of the people I know, come to think of it.

The people involved are....

Short Stories / Novellas
  • “Acadie” by Dave Hutchinson
  • “The Bitten Body” by AC Spahn
  • “Death on the Moon” by Spencer Hart, found in Cirsova issue #6
  • “The First American” by Schuyler Hernstrom, found in Cirsova issue #5
  • “The Pilot” by Andrew Mayne, found in Predator: If It Bleeds
  • “Trouble in an Hourglass” by Jody Lynn Nye, found in Straight Outta Tombstone
My first thought is Jody, easily. But Cirsova has got a lot of people backing them. So start flipping coins.


Novels
  • “Age of Assassins” by RJ Barker
  • “Good to the Last Drop” by Declan Finn
  • “The Guns Above” by Robyn Bennis
  • “Kings of the Wyld” by Nicholas Eames
  • “Legionnaire” by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole
  • “Out of the Soylent Planet” by Robert Kroese
  • “The Rogue Prince” by Lindsay Buroker
Do I have to actually say that I'd like to vote for myself and Good to the Last Drop? I think "Planetary Award Winner" looks just as nice as "Dragon Award Nominated series."

Not that I think I have a hope in heck. Between Cole and Anspach on one end, and Kroese on the other, I'm relatively cooked. In fact, if I'm actually not allowed to vote for myself, Robert Kroese is my bet. Out of the Soylent Planet is the third book in the Rex Nihilo series, so yeah, I'll be happy if it wins.

Of course, I hear about the nomination the day after the novel is pulled from shelves to prep for the Silver Empire rerelease. That's just timing. But hey, it's something to put on the new cover.


If you've already nominated something, you don’t need to cast a vote. It's fairly obvious who you're voting for. You can change your vote in the comments section on their webpage.

However, if you haven't nominated anything, just vote on your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel. Then, leave a comment on their page so they know about the vote. You get one vote for best short story and one for best novel, but you don’t have to use both votes if you’re only interested in one category.

The voting deadline is April 30th, 11:59PM US Pacific time.

If you have a book blog, time to vote. If you don't have a book blog ... now might be the time to start one.

Monday, April 23, 2018

#WorldBookDay Deal and New Release: Pius History


Pius History: The Facts Behind the Pius Trilogy by [Finn, Declan]

So, Pius History is back, completing the Pius series.

Damn, I love that cover.

Anyway, the description is ... really in the title. Pius History: The Facts Behind the Pius Trilogy

Ever wonder about what was fact or fiction in your favorite thriller? How much was made up or how much was just to push the story along? Well, wonder no longer as Declan Finn pulls back the curtain on his epic trilogy to show you his meticulous, painstaking research. Did his fictional pope grow up in a world as rough as described? Are the bad guys really that motivated to end the church? Are some of the weapons real? Did Pius XII really take a side for or against the Nazis? This book has the answers you're looking for.
For the record, this doesn't just discuss World War II. Because the novels didn't cover just World War II. This covers the Cold War, Poland, religious persecution, and the Sudan.

And while we're here, A Pius Man is $.99 for a few days.

Sunday, April 22, 2018

Enter: The Patreon

Last week, I threatened I would put together a Patreon account.

Here it is.

And, yes, you can see the button in the upper right corner. It's going to be there from now on. Hopefully, blogger won't break it on me somehow. I don't know how, but that's a thing I'm certain that Google can make happen.

Anyway....

It's filled with the standard fare: shorts, flash fictions, e-books, signed real books, etc etc. Obviously, I have a lot of miscellaneous stuff on offer, especially when you get to the higher ranks of donation.

This is happening for several reasons. The most important of which is .... it seems to work. So I'll try it and see what works. The second important reason ... money. I have lots of stories kicking around, and a lot of ways to get them out and about.

Also, I'm getting married. So money would be helpful. So if you could kick in a few bucks here and there, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Friday, April 20, 2018

The John Ringo and ConCarolinas issue

I've been scratching my head for a while about whether or not I was going to do a blog post for the whole ConCarolinas debacle.

You know, how they told John Ringo that they couldn't guarantee his safety, etc. THEN the announcement they released about his not attending seemed ... poorly managed.

To be honest, I'd never heard of them until this fashla happened. So they made a great first impression on me.

So much so that they convinced to never attend their convention, as a guest or even as just an attendee.

And no, it's not necessarily "Oh, look what they did to Ringo."

I am doing something radical. I will take them ENTIRELY AT THEIR WORD that they can't guarantee the safety of one of their own guests against the angry hordes of Social Justice Zombies. 

On THEIR OWN TERMS, I should be concerned to even walk the halls as a regular attendee carrying a John Ringo book. While I have no problem defending myself, I to go conventions to have a good time. I don't want to spend the majority of the con in cuffs because some dickheads decide "You're a Ringo fan, therefore you're [insert cliche lefty insults here]" and therefore I have to beat them senseless in self defense.

In the long run, I will be interested to see how this is resolved. Because there are only two options here.

On the one hand, Ringo isn't the only Baen author they have as guests. Dave Webber, Tedd Roberts, etc. These are only a handful of the guests from previous years that I'm aware of. Are the Social Justice douchebags going to stop? No, they're not. They never do, they never will, and they never shall ... unless they meet actual, genuine push back for their stupidity.

So, the question is not "Who boycotts the convention over Ringo?" The real question becomes "Who's next?" The SJWs have tasted blood, and they're never satisfied, and thus they will become hungry for more. The NEXT question after that is "how far does the lefty horde go before the ConCom tells the horde to go screw off?"

The mob have threatened, they have harangued. And that's all well and good. Because there's only two ways for this to go.

Either ConCarolina tells the SJWs to back off, they address the "concerns" they had over Ringo's safety, so he can be invited back next year.

OR, they can continue to pander to the mob and "Go woke, go broke."

Either way, I'll be over here, using DragonCon as my honeymoon. ciao.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

The top ten blogs of A Pius Geek, April 2018

The posts that get hits on this blog astound me. They are mind boggling. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but yeesh.

These are the all time most viewed blogs.


Dec 7, 2017

Considering the general use of the internet for porn, I guess I shouldn't be even moderately surprised that this is one of the most popular blogs. But come now, I'm not a consumer, and it boiled down to a rant about how politics murdered a girl.

The thing that confuses me about the popularity of this is there is nothing here that even remotely fits any definition of "sexy" that I can think of. On a blog that boils down to Catholic nerd writer stuff.

.... Unless you subscribe to the position that the newspaper motto "If it bleeds it leads" is "sexy."  That's what floats your boat, then ... nevermind.


Oct 29, 2012

This isn't too shocking. After all, it's 6 years old, going back to the Obama / Romney election. It's accumulated a lot of hits. I this one was probably carried more by Alex Ross art than anything else. But it's still going strong, having beeing bumped to the #2 spot.

This was fun. I was just going over the top and insane.

But here, Captain America punching Hitler in the face.

Can we have one of Captain America punching Osama in the face? Really. Pretty please?

I actually did one of these for 2016, though it wasn't nearly as popular.

Apr 27, 2015
This one has been in the top ten since I posted it.

This is so successful, I made this into a novel. 

Yes, it's a book now. Please, feel free to to buy it.

If you have no idea what SPBB is ... click here. It is a really, really, really long flipping story. It was a one-shot that spiraled so far out of control, I really didn't see the end of it. I was going to make one lousy parody of one insane bit of Facebook hoopla. 

Then it spiraled.

Oct 3, 2011

Ow. My spin hurts just looking at this.
This was a study of DC Comics and their mistreatment of two of their better female characters when the "New 52" came out. It includes, sex, sex, and more sex. And bad writing.  This is another one that shot to the top in short order. Probably because of, well, the sex involved.

The books had some serious issues, warping the character of Starfire to a bland, uninteresting, amnesiac Gumbi slut, and grinding out a Catwoman comic book with little to no plot, and bizarre artwork, written by a fellow whose creds were more LGBT than the Greenwich Village Halloween parade.

Nov 8, 2010

This is back when I thought there was still some slight hope with Marvel comics, before they just decided to go on a full-bore slippery slope of stupid. There were only slight hints of the oncoming train of SJW suck that were to come. Back then, I had just chalked it up to lousy writing and movie tie-in plots. It was when their biggest problems were "Let's make everything dark and stupid" and mindless "Let's have these fights because FIGHTS."

Seriously, WWE has better writing and storylines.

Granted, we're now at a point where we can look back at World War Hulk as Shakespeare compared to some of the current batch of stupid.


Aug 23, 2017

This one was so insanely popular, I don't even know where to start, to be honest. Within a week of being posted, it had already made it into in the top ten posts of all time.

And I did nothing special. At all. The hits all came from the usual sources: social media. That's it. It's like everyone descended on my blog for this one post. It happened so fast, it was like I had a Larry Correia review. And no, it wasn't shared all that often. Or at all. It's almost like people just tripped over it en mass.

I can get used to that.

The post was also nothing special. It was exactly what the title said it was. I took a character from my Love at First Bite series (starting with Honor at Stake, due to be rereleased from Silver Empire in May of 2018) and sketched out her life, from birth, to death, to her postmortem resume, through World War II, the Vatican, the CIA, the Cold War, to her various and sundry college degrees.

Aug 12, 2015

Another post that boiled down to "What you see is what you get" when it came to my vampire novels and the mythology I made behind it. It smashed together Bram Stoker, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mass Effect, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas into a blender and hit "liquefy."

Otherwise known as what you get when you take a nerdy philosophy major who likes taking his entire knowledge base and smashing them together to see what he gets as an end result... while also keeping the original Dracula and all of the rules that came with it.

Don't worry if the book links don't work, they will soon enough. Probably within 30 days


Apr 28, 2015

Still going strong. This is another one that's not really going away anytime soon.

Again, it's a parody, but it's a parody that had a lot of various backers.

Again, it's for sale. Sorry.



Jul 14, 2016

This one hit the top ten most popular posts on the blog within 24 hours of being posted.

This is what happens when authors like your reviews.

Who knew?


Apr 4, 2017

This has only recently hit the top ten all time. I don't know why. My best guess is that someone was looking for Hugo award nominees for this year, and tripped over this.

The sad thing is, I think we can safely say that this headline could be posted about this year's Hugos, and nothing would have changed any.

That's it. That's the best of the blog thus far. Again, who knew? Some of these aren't a surprise. And it's nice to see that some of it is stuff I put a lot of effort into.

Still odd.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

The Moon Anthology is Closed

How many people remember high school group projects?

You know what I mean: when the teacher assigns everyone to work on a bit of homework, to be turned in on a date, and everyone's grade is going to be the same, no matter the effort everyone put into it. It's a great example of why socialism is a failure: one person might put in 100% of the effort, and everyone else would just blow it off and ride the coattails of the smartest person in the group.

Most of my friends just happened to be that one person in the group, and would take over any group project, almost entirely out of self defense. I was like that too.

So, when I handed in a schedule for the Moon anthology to Superversive Press, I said I would have all of the stories collected by April 16th. When I invited authors to join the anthology -- authors like Jody Lyn Nye and Brad Torgersen -- that's the date I gave them.

But you might remember that I publicly posted that the Moon anthology was due in on April 1st. Why the discrepancy? I remembered the group projects, and I knew that several people would turn in a project AFTER the last possible minute.

But now, the last of the stories are in. And have we got an awesome lineup.

Obviously, we're not entirely done with the process. Some stories can be further edited, which will allow us to squeeze in more stories, which will eventually dictate the final lineup.

Right now, the preliminary list looks like seven dragon award finalists with ten nominations and a win between them, as well as two NY Times bestselling authors.

So, not a bad start.

Monday, April 16, 2018

So, this happened

I'm engaged.

Yes, to be married.

.... No, that's about all I have to say on the matter. If you find that my blog posts drop off for a while, well, I'm a little busy.

Between getting married, editing an anthology, editing my books for rerelease, editing a space opera that I've worked on forever, and writing three new novels .... I'm a little busy.

This of course doesn't even begin to cover that I'm going to start a Patreon account -- they seem to be all the rage these days -- and keep up with the edits to the remaining three anthologies I'm going to be in this year.

So, yeah, the blog may not be updated on a daily basis for a while.

If your first response is to say "Good for you, how can we do you a mitzvah?" then it's .... just the usual, really....

I'll have details as they emerge.

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Cover Reveal: Honor at Stake, evolution

I had thought that my Pius series had gone through a lot of changes over time. I never expected that Honor at Stake would try to catch up. But then again, Honor at Stake is the only book of mine to have two publishers, and be pulled from the shelves twice.

The first time Honor at Stake was released, it was with Damnation Press. It took a while to pound out a cover.

The first Honor at Stake cover they sent me was .... eh.

The image on the left was the first one that had been sent my way from Damnation. I had to ask for some changed. The end result was the one on the right -- which I believe we can all agree is the better cover, if only for the clarity of the title alone.

And, really, the second one was okay. My biggest problem was the lilac colored binding. Yes, really.


Then there was when entirely self-published the series. There were multiple reasons for it -- speed being the first one. The novel had been unpublished, pulled from shelves, and then put back on Amazon within the space of a week.

A large part of the delay on the first rerelease was generating a cover.

I've done posts on covers I've created myself. Had I known that self publishing was this much in my future, I would have minored in computer graphics.

However, Dawn Witzke had already done several cover redesigns on The Pius Trilogy when I self published it (I suspect in part because they were cringe-worthy and she couldn't stand the sight of them). So she was almost eager to do Honor at Stake. I sent her multiple images from the local cemetery, Mount Olivet, which is where the major battle of the novel took place. I took over 700 pictures that day, and barely covered it.

The picture on the left isn't the exact image used for the book cover, but it's in the ball park.


Image may contain: sky, tree, plant, grass and outdoor


On the right ... well, it's amazing what you can do by changing the lighting and adding a few clouds, isn't it?

And then Silver Empire signed on the Love at First Bite series.

And this is the brand new cover.


Not bad, huh.

Personally, though, I think I'd have been happy with just the redhead, but you really can't exclude Marco from the cover. The gist of this is to make Marco look sinister and threatening ... because that's really how he looks for most of the book..

And before anyone tries to critique the book let me show you an image of the current bestsellers in "Thriller / Paranomal suspense / vampires," as of the time of this writing.


So, yeah. I'm good with the Honor At Stake cover from Silver Empire.