Phil Elmore's Blog, page 35
July 4, 2012
Technocracy: Smoking is an indulgence, not a liberty
My WND Technocracy column today is about a topic on which I’ve spent considerable thought over the years: smoking, and whether it is an individual liberty.
Except in rare and very controlled circumstances, smokers cannot confine their habit to their bodies alone.
The fact is that it’s not possible to confine your smoking to your own person. More importantly, smoking is the leading cause of fires that lead to death. I’m no safety Nazi, but I’m sick and tired of idiot smokers burning down their homes and others’ apartments because they can’t be bothered to smoke without setting fire to the place.
Read the full column here in WND.
July 2, 2012
Executioner: Final Judgment
Just in time for Independence Day, I have another Mack Bolan book on the newsstands — my fifteenth in the various Bolan series. This one, coincidentally, is another neo-Nazi/skinhead adventure. When an aged Nazi is put on trial for war crimes, his followers take prisoners and flee with the old man in tow. It falls to Bolan to root out the enemy while running interference against a Jewish anti-holocaust group whose leadership has gone radical.
This is one of those shorter adventures that I think makes for a very entertaining romp. I don’t really have neo-Nazis on the brain, or anything, but when I pitched storylines to Harlequin, they picked out two in a row that just happened to have skinheads as the badguys. (These Communist Chinese are another batch of villains I use a lot.)
Get your copy today wherever Gold Eagle books are sold, including Amazon. You can get these as Kindle books too, you know.
June 27, 2012
Technocracy: The Left’s Dangerous ‘SWAT-ting’
My WND Technocracy column this week is about the disturbing trend in which conservative bloggers have been targeted for false police reports of violent incidents.
“SWAT-ting” is so named because it involves tricking emergency response personnel into believing a call for help has been placed from the victim’s home.
The implications of such false reports, in which phone numbers and addresses have been spoofed, are obvious: Somebody’s going to die eventually. Whether it’s an innocent conservative whose only crime is blogging about leftist scum, or an equally innocent police officer who walks into the bullet of a citizen who thinks he’s facing a home invasion, SWAT-ting will kill someone before long if it doesn’t stop.
Read the full column here in WND.
June 20, 2012
Technocracy: No, the 2 parties are NOT the same!
I’m so tired of hearing that your vote for the Democrats or the Republicans makes no difference. That’s the theme of my WND Technocracy column this week.
Only by standing against the Democrats, the party of abortion, the party of vote fraud, the party of gun control, the party of socialism, the party of surrender and appeasement in the face of our nation’s enemies, can we prevail.
While both parties fail their constituents, it most definitely does make a difference when you vote for one or the other. One party stands explicitly for evil. That party is the Democrats.
Read the full column here in WND.
June 13, 2012
Technocracy: Up Yours, Michael Bloomberg!
My WND Technocracy column this week is a response to New York City’s little dictator, liberal RINO Michael Bloomberg.
Michael Bloomberg’s authority to police New Yorkers’ mouths has been presumed unlimited.
Bloomberg believes — in a city that saw more than 200 murders last year — that it is the appropriate role of government to police what its citizens eat. He is very wrong, but his attitudes epitomize the liberal mentality. Every lib is a little Michael Bloomberg looking for serfs over whom to lord petty power.
Read the full column here in WND.
June 6, 2012
Technocracy: Democrats treat minorities like imbeciles!
My WND Technocracy column this week is about the mantra that “voter ID is voter suppression.”
How dare those monsters demand voters produce, on request, something those voters already use every day?
The Democrats apparently believe the average person of color is too dumb to obtain a valid photo ID — something that person will use countless times, day in and day out, if they are a legal US citizen.
Please read the full column here and share it with others via social media.
June 4, 2012
SuperBolan: Radical Edge
Radical Edge is my 14th novel for Gold Eagle/Harlequin Enterprises. I think it might be the best Bolan fiction I’ve written to date. I made a conscious effort to push the envelope a little more in crafting the story — giving Bolan more challenges to deal with, more emotion, etc. The result is less formulaic (although I write damned good formula, in my opinion) and a little more visceral. Available online and wherever Gold Eagle books are carried.
June 1, 2012
Don’t Undervalue Your Work
Every freelancer understands the temptation: Desperate to pay bills, you need work, any work, and you need it now. A big job that comes the week after the rent’s due won’t cut it. You need positive cash flow. To land that job, that new client, you offer a discount. The client counters with an offer less than half your usual rate. It’s low. It’s so low that it’s insulting.
You agree anyway, because the low amount is still enough to keep the lights on.
Here’s the problem: You’re now obligated to do your best work for a client who has paid you less than half of what you’re worth. The knowledge that you’re essentially working for free will stick in your craw long after you’ve spent that money. Tell me you can go the extra mile, bend over backwards to please your client, when you know you weren’t properly compensated for your effort. You’ll resent the work, and because you resent it, you’ll be miserable doing it.
We’ve all made those calls. It would be easy for me simply to counsel you to refuse underpaid work, to say no to cut rates. Reality, though, is seldom that simple. To stay solvent you may well have to whore yourself a little, get paid less than what you deserve. What you’ve got to remember, however, is not to take such calls lightly. Weigh them carefully. Accept deep discounts only when you’re most desperate, and then only because you must. Once your immediate cash flow problems are solved and your budget is sustainable, don’t be afraid to ask for concessions.
Here’s an example: If I accept a deeply discounted job, it must be with the understanding that the client give me a little leeway on the deadline. If he won’t budge, then I’d rather refund his money than take his abuse. Every client is different and most of them are great — especially the ones who become your repeat customers. Once in a while, though, you’ll run up against someone who wants the world. He wants you to work for a pittance, and he wants you to adhere to a tight schedule with no flexibility.
You deserve better than to work for that guy. There may be times you have no choice, but in all but the most dire situations, I urge you to value yourself properly and to enforce your boundaries with self-respect and dignity. You may need work — we all do — but you don’t need slave wages, and you don’t need abuse. There isn’t a freelance writer in the world who, of necessity, hasn’t suffered for what he does. Don’t volunteer for more if you can help it.
I Narrated Lee Chambers’ “The Pineville Heist”
If you’d like to hear me read a young adult thriller about a bunch of kids embroiled in a small-town robbery (which goes horribly, murderously awry), you can listen to Lee Chambers’ The Pineville Heist. I narrated the hell out of this thing. I found filmmaker and author Lee Chambers to be a really nice guy, too, who has a great deal of enthusiasm for what he does.
Great Review of “Simon Vector”
http://sqt-fantasy-sci-fi-girl.blogsp...
Check out this great review of Simon Vector:
“…[T]he book is very good at maintaining a high level of suspense. Like a good horror movie, the reader can never be sure who is going to survive the escape from the prison, and because of the setting many of the characters are reprehensible so you begin to wonder if you should be rooting for them at all. The Harvester hybrids are grotesque creatures; bits and pieces of humans, aliens and machinery sewn together who are looking to tear apart any living thing they come into contact with. In a prison that’s gone into lockdown, with a master computer that’s been infested with a virus and is slowly failing and speaking in maddening phrases, with a human military force bearing down on the planet to contain the infestation – the odds are stacked against anyone surviving.
“Simon Vector could easily be the beginning of a larger story, told in any sort of medium from more books, to comics or videogames. I could easily see this being adapted into a movie. ”
Read the full review.
