Sigh…

Posted on by January 22, 2022

As if Loudoun County wasn’t bad enough, now Fairfax County has doubled down on the stupid…

On Friday, Jan. 21, 2022, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand issued a “Principal Briefing” that orders administrators to suspend students who don’t wear masks to school, according to a copy of the briefing that a whistleblower provided Parents Defending Education.

The edict is in defiance of an executive order by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin giving parents the right to choose whether their children wear masks to school or not.

Full article, HERE. I’m really not sure why they think open defiance of the state government is a good idea, but then they ‘think’ since they are the ‘elite’ and know better…

I don’t see this one ending well either. The AG’s been pretty clear he’s going to investigate school systems that don’t follow directives.

And this one is worth thinking about…

Book promo…

Posted on by January 21, 2022

Dave Freer is out with a new novel Cloud Castles

As always, click on the cover for the Amazon link!

The blurb-

Augustus Thistlewood was an idealist. The youngest scion of a vastly wealthy family, he’d come to help the poor, deprived people of the strange world of Sybill III – a gas-dwarf world with no habitable land. The human population, descendants of a crashed convict transport, lived on a tiny, crowded, alien antigravity plate they called ‘the Big Syd’, drifting through the clouds in the upper atmosphere. It was a few square miles of squalor, in a vast sea of sky, ruled by the degenerate relics of two alien empires.
The problem was that the people of the Big Syd wanted to help themselves, first – to his money, his liberty, and even his life.
Only two things stood between them and this: the first was his ‘assistant’ Briz, – a ragged urchin he’d picked up as a guide. She reckoned if anyone was going to steal from Augustus, it was going to be her, even if she had to keep him alive so that she could do it. And the second thing was Augustus himself. He didn’t know what ‘giving up’ meant. Actually, he didn’t know what most things meant. As a naïve, wide-eyed innocent blundering through the cess-pit of Sybill III, he was going to have to learn, mostly the hard way. Some of that learning was going to be out in the strange society that existed on the endless drifting clumps of airborne vegetation, and the Cloud-Castles of the aliens who hunted across them. Most of it was learning that philanthropy wasn’t quite what they’d taught him in college.

Next up is Pam Uphoff with the fourth novella in her Fall of the Alliance series- Murder at Kozolov House

The blurb-

A Murder Mystery in the Fall of the Alliance series.

A Garden Party at Kozlov House, the Host murdered! Detective Inspector Smirnov is back to find the killer. Was it the angry Wife? A Political Rival? The son? The professor? Or . . . something more sinister?

And last, but certainly not least, our own Bessie BIngle is out with a new short story Sedna

The blurb-

Enjoy, especially with the cold weather, it’s time to stay in and read!

Copyright law under fire…

Posted on by January 18, 2022

If you produce Intellectual Property (IP) and copyright it, you need to pay attention to this…

For years companies like Google and Spotify, whose revenue streams depend on content and profits depend on how cheaply they can acquire it, have worked to weaken copyright protections. They know they can’t get what they want through a transparent legislative process, so they’ve set their sights on effectively changing the law by using “a well-established legal organization to ‘restate’ and reinterpret our copyright laws for the nation’s judicial system.”

The organization, American Legal Institute (ALI), an invite-only organization for legal scholars, is known for its Restatements of Law, which have been described as “Cliff’s Notes” guides to various legal topics:

Full article HERE, from J. Van Laar at RedState

And a follow-up article.

Now a massive astroturfing effort is happening in the field of copyright law, and anyone who produces creative content should be paying close attention. As I wrote last week, there are major problems with the American Law Institute’s Restatement project, starting with how the project was initiated (at the request of a Google-funded, anti-copyright law activist professor) and the Lead Reporter’s unacknowledged conflicts of interest.  

Full article HERE, from J.Van Laar at RedState

And then there is THIS stupidity…

As if they aren’t coming after us hard enough, now they want more… Especially Google.

If you use Google Docs, you REALLY need to read the TOS. Effectively they ‘own’ anything you put up there, and if you use Google drives, they can take everything down and kill your account and you have NO recourse to recover any items.

TBT…

Posted on by January 19, 2022

WAY back in the day… early 70s, no it’s not me in the picture, but I got to ‘enjoy’ Warner Springs in January going through SERE training… Brrr… War Criminal #25!!!

And yes, the damned rattlesnakes were PROTECTED!!! Cost us our stew… sigh

Vintage Gary Larson toon…

These were always fun, when you ‘hung’ a sonobuoy on a ‘playmate’ and listened to it banging down the hull… 🙂

 

 

Posted in TBT

Mea culpa…

Posted on by January 18, 2022

Mea cupla, mea maxima cupla…

We screwed up yesterday on the YouTube live stream!

https://www.youtube.com/user/OldNFO

LawDog and I put out that the ‘new’ vax mandate DID apply to truck drivers.

And we were wrong!!! h/t to Regan for the correction.

OSHA clarified vax mandate wouldn’t apply to most truck drivers just before rule was stayed by SCOTUS

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration updated its FAQ with new information about truck drivers related to the Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) that could require workers at companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

A lawsuit challenging the ETS was decided in favor of staying the OSHA’s rule by the Supreme Court on Thursday, January 13, just days after OSHA began enforcing the ETS on Jan. 10. The agency had said in a statement that it would not issue citations for noncompliance with its vaccination or testing requirements before Feb. 9, as long as employers exercised “good faith efforts” to come into compliance with the ETS — efforts which are moot given the court’s ruling. 

Full article HERE from Overdrive.

But, even with that, the shelves ARE getting barer by the day… dammit…

If you haven’t got at least some food back for emergencies, I’d strongly recommend you hit the store when you can. Winter is coming, and on top of everything else, who knows what that is going to bring as far as services/delivery/stocks of supplies.

New Rimworld is up!!!

Posted on by January 17, 2022

Rimworld- Diplomatic Immunity is now live on Kindle!

Click on the cover for the Amazon link!

The blurb-

Fargo’s latest attempt at quiet retirement is going haywire quickly.

Hiding the officially missing Dragoon heir at his cabin is about to get interesting.

A GalPat change of command brings new attention to his militia and their capabilities, just as he’s falsely accused of murder. Facing a stacked prosecution, he finds that friends have hidden abilities when they come to his aid, including hiding the heir.

When he comes back out, he’s got an agenda and an heir to get home in one piece… A young man thought lost, whose homecoming will shake an entire empire. And hopefully Fargo will survive the experience.

The paperback version will follow in probably three or four days. Please review it, HONEST reviews are appreciated.

Off doing research…

Posted on by January 15, 2022

Getting geared up for the second in the new western series, so my visit up to Amarillo! Specifically to the panhandle plains historical museum. These are some of the original brands of Texas ranches that surround the main doors.

 

And this is one that got pulled for us, an 1860’s Colt Pocket Police! It’s in excellent shape for its age! Yes, it’s been well used, and no, they didn’t have front sights.

It is .36 caliber, and was literally carried in a front pocket of men’s trousers. The pockets were much deeper, and, lined with leather, became a suitable holster. Or they were carried in a jacket pocket.

The rest of the pics won’t mean anything, as they were close ups of various implements.

Go read the folks on the sidebar, I’ll be back to regular blogging on Tuesday.

Book promo…

Posted on by January 13, 2022

Two new books by friends today!

First up is Mike Watson’s newest book in the 1632/Ring of Fire world- The Marshals

The blurb-

The New United States is about to join the United States of Europe, becoming the State of Thuringia and Franconia. The Thirty Years’ War is still being waged. Armies cross and re-cross the German states. With war comes lawlessness, and with lawlessness comes the need for law and order.

Who can fill this enforcement niche better than three retired old soldiers, known to down-timers as the Die Drei Alten Soldaten? Archie Mitchell, Harley Thomas, Max Huffman, retired US Army Master Sergeants who, with their apprentice, Dieter Issler, use their up-time experience as Deputy Sheriffs, to become the first Marshals of the newly created District Court system of the SoTF.

The Marshals are little known until Thomas Bloem and his sister, Maria D’Angelo, brother and sister journalists, arrive to interview them. They record the formation of the Marshal’s Service and the three Marshals, from their first case as Marion County Deputy Sheriffs, until they leave Grantville to provide law and order throughout the State of Thuringia and Franconia.

Mike has done some short stories around these characters, and in that world for Eric Flint’s Grantville Gazette and now has a complete and very well done novel in the world.

Next up is Peter Grant’s new western and new series, Annals of Ash- Wood, Iron, and Blood

The blurb-

Sometimes wanderlust skips a generation… but when it strikes, it strikes gold.

In 1852, fourteen-year-old Jeremy Ash rises to his grandfather’s challenge and sets out on the adventure of a lifetime – the California Trail.

It’s four deadly months and 1,600 merciless miles from the Missouri River to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada. There’s alkali water that’ll poison you; desert heat that’ll fry your brains; mountain passes that’ll crush you; swarms of biting insects that’ll drive you mad; deadly diseases that’ll plague you; and warrior tribes that may make it lethally clear they don’t want you there.

Will the California Trail kill Jeremy, like so many others before him? Or will it make a man out of him? 

This one snuck up on Peter, and his muse drove him like a rented mule! It’s a great read!

Umm… About that research…

Posted on by January 11, 2022

Apparently there is a ‘move’ afoot to quash certain kinds of paleogenetic research into where ‘we’ came from…

And it’s being ‘fought’ by the native American tribes!

The Campaign to Thwart Paleogenetic Research Into North America’s Indigenous Peoples

But this is where events took a strange turn: It was when Duggan’s group announced that they’d gained the capacity to analyze aDNA, and made known their plans to apply this technology to the male genome of their Labrador/Newfoundland skeletal sample, that a sense of apprehension seemed to spread through some quarters of the paleogenetic community.

During the summer of 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Duggan’s project went noticeably quiet. I inquired among team members with whom I regularly communicated, but received oblique and evasive responses about the pace of research and publication.

Full article, HERE from Quillette. It’s a bit of a read, but very interesting in what it reveals. And, IMHO, it is truly sad that this is happening, especially with more and more people researching their family histories and the ongoing DNA studies.