THEM by MG Hardie begins with the protagonist clothes burned and singed his pursuer closing in on him. THEM takes the reader through a collapsing cave to South American sights and sounds to ocean depths to African castles to Middle Eastern villages.
“THEM starts deep and hard and continues in this vane, it’s thoughtful and fast. The insights into the human condition and the system had me asking myself questions and staying up late to finish reading. This is no normal superhero novel, Devon is more like Captain America, with a masters in law. The final scene is as in depth and thought provoking as any book I’ve ever read.”- http://www.jeremypoole.net/blog/-book-review-them-by-mg-hardie
“The way MG Hardie achieved that balance between story moving forward and philosophy reminds me of Richard Bach and Michael Crichton books…this one had me hooked.” – Corey at Carbor Reviews
“After strange mysteries begin to alter Devon’s perceptions, the ordinariness of Heathrow’s existence gives way to a very believable tale of horror as he learns about two unseen “species” apparently at war over the fate of humankind. ‘Them’ by MG Hardie is surprisingly vivid and descriptive.”- Dr. Wesley Britton of Book Pleasures.com
“The way MG Hardie achieved that balance between story moving forward and philosophy reminds me of Richard Bach and Michael Crichton books…this one had me hooked.” – Corey at Carbor Reviews
“THEM by MG Hardie book gave me all I am asking for, when I am reading. It’s cleverly written, well thought out and has some humor in it as well.”- Angel Heart Reviews
“THEM, was a pleasant surprise for this reader. It’s unique, suspenseful and leaves you wondering.” -bookreadersheaven.blogspot.com
World travel, supernatural battles and explorations of social and political issues are commonplace. In THEM, Hardie takes unflinching looks at complex issues such as the moral ramifications of violence, along with the nature of history, with themes of redemption, and faith.
MG Hardie’s THEM poses the question: Does talent, hard work, or fate determine who gets the contract, the promotion, the gig, or the role? Or it’s THEM…
Lightening struck the airplane at 350 mph and 10,000 feet. After the right and left wings separated the airplane, carrying 92 passengers, quickly came apart over the Peruvian rain forest.
Chaos was all around her and she was still strapped to her seat. Within 60 horrifying seconds she fell thousands of feet. The airplane crashed in flames into a mountainous jungle terrain and Juliane Koepckeshe became the sole survivor of flight 508.
SMXLL
Bruised, traumatized, a broken collarbone, cold and alone in the wilderness with only a few pieces of candy as food. One day of walking and she found a small stream and was able to keep hydrated. For eight days she followed the stream battling insects and an arm infection. On the ninth day she wandered upon an encampment and a few hours later she was rescued by loggers and airlifted to a hospital.
Could this one in a billion lightening strike be more than just a random happening by nature? Was her free fall from thousands of feet to land largely unharmed in the middle of nowhere the work of an unseen hand? Or was it something else entirely… THEM
This morning a tiny village was almost wiped off the side of the mountain. The death toll climbed and when hope was exhausted a four-month-old baby boy was rescued from underneath rubble where it had been for at least 22 hours after the 7.9 earthquake struck.
“A wave of water thru me out of my house down the block into 10 ft deep water. The neighborhood was under water. I thought I wasn’t going to make it.”
A 10-month only baby girl was found alone and injured in a cornfield 10 miles from her home, where tornadoes struck 5 hours ago.
Maybe you just missed your, a flight that later went careening down the runway…
An unexpected call caused you to miss the train that derailed later that day.
Perhaps the tornado didn’t affect you at all because, for some reason, you didn’t do what you always did.
Maybe you didn’t travel the same way you always did, maybe your keys were lost and you missed the bus, maybe you were lucky, maybe it was THEM.
In Georgia, a 3,000 lb Chevy Impala slipped off a jack and onto a young man. Without any assistance, his mother, Angela Cavallo, picked up the car and held it for five minutes until neighbors could pull her son to safety.
As the helicopter came in for a soft landing, it suddenly careened out of control and slammed to the ground, this was all caught on film. One of the pilots was trapped under the helicopter in the shallow water. Warren “Tiny” Everal ran over and lifted the helicopter off the pilot. The chopper was a Hughes 500D, which weighs 1550 lb when empty, the pilot recovered.
The 4,000 lb BMW slipped off the jack and landed on the mechanics chest, crushing him. With no time to waste the mechanic’s 22-year-old daughter lifted the car and moved it off her father, the performed CPR to keep him breathing.
Science says that under acute stress, the body’s sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for sustained, vigorous action. The adrenal gland dumps cortisol and adrenaline into the blood stream. Blood pressure surges and the heart races, delivering oxygen and energy to the muscles. It’s the biological equivalent of opening the throttle of an engine.
Does this science explanation explain how someone who isn’t Captain America can lift a helicopter? Does science explain how these people had the strength to lift a car off of someone? Maybe science has the answer, maybe just maybe there is another one… THEM.
Late on a dark New Orleans, a jogging Peter Gold saw a hoodie wearing man dragging a woman down the street. Gold intervened as the man tried to get the woman into a SUV near the intersection of Magazine and St. Mary streets. The man let go of the woman, held his gun to Gold, looked him in the face and said ‘I’m going to kill you‘, then he shot Gold point blank in the stomach.
Gold lay on the sidewalk and pleaded for his life. The hoodied man put the gun to Gold’s head, pulled back the slide on the black semi-automatic gun and pulled the trigger. “I saw the man squeezing the trigger repeatedly. He said the gun was jamming.” Gold recalled. When the gun didn’t fire the man took the woman’s purse and drove away.
Gold recovered from his injuries in what everyone has called an “incredible miracle.” Gold graduated from Tulane medical school and continues with a residency in orthopedic surgery at a hospital in New York City. “I’m just very lucky and fortunate to be able to come out of that alive,” Gold said. “I think about that day every single day of my life.”
Every single day Gold thinks about how he almost died, “I wonder what happened in somebody’s life that they were able to create such violence with such ease without even thinking about it.” Gold has a started a nonprofit foundation called MyStrongCity to provide education, mentoring and to raise money for community-based organizations that empower undeserved youth.
The gunman, who was captured later, attacked three other people immediately after leaving Gold.
Gold says that he was “lucky”, but could the gun jamming be attributed to something other than luck? Would he have started this foundation that has helped thousands of people, if this horrible incident had not occurred? Could this happening be something other than fortune smiling on him?
Photonic circuts, integrated projection, light interfaces, morph technology, but weren’t we were promised better education, a better society and better communities? I know you’re sitting there smugly thinking ‘but we are smarter’ and that thought only serves to further prove the point. We were seduced with the possibility of more access and information. The children and the generations aren’t better, we were sold a bill of goods that didn’t deliver, well they have delivered a new addiction. Our thoughts center on the techno because we need the instant access, we need to know now. Smartphones that create hotspots and have enough power to turn into laptops and dock with your HD television and car. Soon they will be able to dock with you, you’d probably like that. We will continue to wait on the next ring, vibration, update or the the next big thing in technology, but haven’t we have forgotten the place of these devices?They have turned single tasking into “multi-tasking”, I mean task-switching because we really don’t multi-task. Yeah, I know you can multi-task with the best of them. We all think that we can, but multi-tasking slows you down by causing errors, sloppiness, shoddy work, and if you stop lying to yourself none of this will be in dispute. Humans are nothing without our ability to focus, that’s how we created them. And for a bonus all this technology comes with intentional blindness and the delusion that you are aware when you aren’t. Even in the movies where they show a distant future, with beyond the wildest of imaginations of technological advancement and there are still a myraid of problems not solved. I’ve seen “Blade Runner”, “Star Wars”, “iRobot”, “Minority Report” and “Demolition Man” the computerized future is not better. FANBOYS stop rubbing the device already, yeah I know you could if you wanted to.
The information revolution brought Real time, Down time, Pods, Tweets, Tabs, and Posts, but it is the adults who are the most responsible for exposing the most vulnerable and susceptible of our citizens, the children. Adults have allowed this technology in and around our babies, their schools and classrooms. Colleges require that you not only purchase a computer, but also spend hundreds of dollars on software, or fail the course. Tax payers and parents have spent hundreds of millions of dollar on the technological school, and test scores have gone down. Couldn’t we have better served the children, the community and ourselves by not being slaves to the industry. Children are growing up online, technology has shortened attentions spans and contributes to ADD. Children are now more connected to the technology than to people who provide it, this is where they gain their social experiences. The social networks can connect you with protests occurring around the world, but they can’t make you care. And with the touch of a screen they spy on their roommates sexual preferences, and then broadcast them to the world.
The greatest lie of the digital age is that you control the message. You do not control the message when your child’s second life is virtual. Children have a lack of clarity, some of them can’t play outside and become bored easily. It is true that every generation will be critizied for something, being too liberal, too obsessed with technology, too dumb. This generation is hardly the dumbest generation, however a sharp decrease in intellect is apparent, noted by declines in text scores and literacy rates.
“As the digital age has transformed the world and workforce, U.S. K–12 education has fallen woefully behind in preparing students with the fundamental computer science knowledge and skills they need for fully behind in preparing students with the fundamental future success.”- Computer World Magazine
The bottom line is that tutitions have skyrocketed, but 50% of college students have not improved. Books still cost an arm and a leg and many of them are digital. Let’s face it students aren’t getting ahead and the technology cost money, perhaps too much. New hardware is often over priced and buggy. It usually takes three or four generations for a company to get a device right, so generations 1-3 are merely for fund raising, which reduces early adopters to nothing more than self indulgent guinea pigs. If a politician promised all these things, but never delivered would we reelect them… On second thought that’s a bad analogy. However, every quarter we reelect a new cell phone, and every year a new computing device, we have been programmed to sustain a another failed industry. We have more information but racism, classism and sexism are all on the rise. Millions of people are unemployed. The government still has secrets, Cable cost more, Violence is still senseless, Movie are still expensive to nothing of the quality, Celebrities still use drugs and wear no underwear, DNA evidence is still wrong, Music hasn’t gotten better, The elderly are still mistreated, We still get lost in our cars and we miss our buses, but hey I can touch a screen and change a page. Different does not mean better, we have lost sight of that. All the while these companies that make and sell these products have become worldwide billion dollar conglomerates. Maybe things would be different if you didn’t have to pay for it…and worse of all poetry doesn’t read the same. We have programmed these devices to calculate everything except our fear, fear of being left behind.
Anxiety, Stress, Nervousness, Insecurity, Internet inactivity…Perhaps this is why we hide behind avatars and professional profile photos. Are our “Friends” really inside that gadget? If so, what happens to them when we turn it off? Are we really linked? Don’t look now, the App beacons. 3G, 4G, Android,3D, Windows, GUI, Laser Etched, 4K, App, Opened Sourced, Cellphones that double as tasers, omnitouch… consume or perish. Who doesn’t have a touch screen television with dashboard widgets, but we were promised the eradication of diseases, the finding of cures and the solving of age-old problems. Strangely, there are more diseases, no cures and more problems than ever before. There are those that say “Technology is not dangerous the way in which we use it is dangerous”, and as always the debate ends when something tragic happens. We were promised security, but there are even more security measures, concerns, threats and prisons. We were all promised more knowledge, but we seem a bit dumber. These machines were said to help us make decisions, but unwanted pregnancies and divorce rates are higher. 50 Billion searhces on Google each month and we still haven’t found the truth… the search continues.
Overlays, screens, processing power, virtual children, pets, exabytes, tickers, more distractions. You get a ticket for talking on your cell phone, but somehow the law doesn’t apply to police officers… it never does. And soon as we find a discrepancy, a fault, a sub routine error, we get sold on using technology to fight technology. We are, for better or worse, married to technology. It seemed reasonable to create thousands of nuclear weapons, but now it seems unreasonable for anyone else to have one. Skype. What did you call me? Technological advancement was supposed to free us, but are we not invisibly chained to our desks, LCD, Do-dads, interfaces, whatchamacallits and doohickies? A hacker can take down Sony’s Playstation Network for a month and compromise 20 million credit cards in the process and the news doesn’t make a peep because this it the new digital way of life, where these threats are common place. Twitter beefs have real life and death consequences. Entertainers tell their followers that “Google is God”. Nintendo’s new console wants players to “feel” shapes and objects in the game all the while we are trying to mentally project our digital self as a form of control, the illusion on control that is. Is there a such thing as technological oppression? How ironic it would be if your entire life were photo shopped…. Maybe you should post that.
Internet dependence. Labor-saving, hands free, fail, manage the inbox of the mind. We claim to treasure our individualism, but we own the same devices, made by the same companies… go figure. And now the gadets are more important than your safety, or the safety of others. Print is Dead and were it not for two wars, newspapers would have went the way of the Dodo. The web took the Music out of Music Television, which has now resorted to exploiting children for ratings, while marketing and early adopters have convinced us that with these devices is a better way to exist, than without. Revolutions in technology have innovated new ways to make a living. Yes, the world has changed, a job in the factory and mill is now one in the office and idea centers. It seems as though Tech pioneers have sparked and stunted creativity all at once. How did we get to the point when someone with a cell phone can shut down corporations, crippled the stock market and hamper our government? The technology can connect us and disconnect us, as a tool it can bring the world closer (see Egypt). The truth is that Revolution comes through the people not from the technology. It will all begin to dawn on you when you discover that you cellphone is actually spying on you.
February 2, 2011
Point Click Share (Part 2)
Posted by MG under interesting, media | Tags: 3D, 4k, apps, cell phone, commentary, digital, education, egypt, essay, evolution, G4, god, Google, hacker, internet, iphone, microsoft, nintendo, nintendo feel, omnitouch, part 2, photo shop, playstation network, security, series, Skype, Smartphone, social network, Sony, tablet, technology, twitter |1 Comment
(From Part 1)
Anxiety, Stress, Nervousness, Insecurity, Internet inactivity…Perhaps this is why we hide behind avatars and professional profile photos. Are our “Friends” really inside that gadget? If so, what happens to them when we turn it off? Are we really linked? Don’t look now, the App beacons. 3G, 4G, Android,3D, Windows, GUI, Laser Etched, 4K, App, Opened Sourced, Cellphones that double as tasers, omnitouch… consume or perish. Who doesn’t have a touch screen television with dashboard widgets, but we were promised the eradication of diseases, the finding of cures and the solving of age-old problems. Strangely, there are more diseases, no cures and more problems than ever before. There are those that say “Technology is not dangerous the way in which we use it is dangerous”, and as always the debate ends when something tragic happens. We were promised security, but there are even more security measures, concerns, threats and prisons. We were all promised more knowledge, but we seem a bit dumber. These machines were said to help us make decisions, but unwanted pregnancies and divorce rates are higher. 50 Billion searhces on Google each month and we still haven’t found the truth… the search continues.
Overlays, screens, processing power, virtual children, pets, exabytes, tickers, more distractions. You get a ticket for talking on your cell phone, but somehow the law doesn’t apply to police officers… it never does. And soon as we find a discrepancy, a fault, a sub routine error, we get sold on using technology to fight technology. We are, for better or worse, married to technology. It seemed reasonable to create thousands of nuclear weapons, but now it seems unreasonable for anyone else to have one. Skype. What did you call me? Technological advancement was supposed to free us, but are we not invisibly chained to our desks, LCD, Do-dads, interfaces, whatchamacallits and doohickies? A hacker can take down Sony’s Playstation Network for a month and compromise 20 million credit cards in the process and the news doesn’t make a peep because this it the new digital way of life, where these threats are common place. Twitter beefs have real life and death consequences. Entertainers tell their followers that “Google is God”. Nintendo’s new console wants players to “feel” shapes and objects in the game all the while we are trying to mentally project our digital self as a form of control, the illusion on control that is. Is there a such thing as technological oppression? How ironic it would be if your entire life were photo shopped…. Maybe you should post that.
Internet dependence. Labor-saving, hands free, fail, manage the inbox of the mind. We claim to treasure our individualism, but we own the same devices, made by the same companies… go figure. And now the gadets are more important than your safety, or the safety of others. Print is Dead and were it not for two wars, newspapers would have went the way of the Dodo. The web took the Music out of Music Television, which has now resorted to exploiting children for ratings, while marketing and early adopters have convinced us that with these devices is a better way to exist, than without. Revolutions in technology have innovated new ways to make a living. Yes, the world has changed, a job in the factory and mill is now one in the office and idea centers. It seems as though Tech pioneers have sparked and stunted creativity all at once. How did we get to the point when someone with a cell phone can shut down corporations, crippled the stock market and hamper our government? The technology can connect us and disconnect us, as a tool it can bring the world closer (see Egypt). The truth is that Revolution comes through the people not from the technology. It will all begin to dawn on you when you discover that you cellphone is actually spying on you.
(Cont)…