Interesting…

Posted on by June 11, 2019

There had been some rumbles about this online, and now it looks like the AMA has actually stepped up.

Members of the American Medical Association voted this week to support state policies that would allow minors to override their parents’ objections to vaccinations.

Full article, HERE.

And the whole whodoneit situation down in the Dominican Republic is getting stranger and stranger…

US authorities are scrambling to get to the bottom of a rash of deaths of US tourists in the Dominican Republic, with the number of reported fatalities over the past year now rising to six.

Full article, HERE.

There was an ‘interview’ that floated across my feed yesterday that was some hotel ‘magnate’ in the DR who claimed it was the stupid Americans who drank to much, ate too much, and partied too much. There was nothing wrong with the booze in the hotels… Yeah, right.

It appears from some reports that many of the hotels are all inclusives, and the ‘minibar’ uses full sized bottles that are refilled with ‘unknown’ liquors. That was something we were cautioned about back in the 70s, to NEVER drink from a bottle we didn’t see the seal cracked on. Granted that could be faked too, which is why most of us patronized the Class 6 store.

Oh yeah, and all those ‘beautiful people’ you see in the ads… Not so much. They’re paid actors, sent down to empty resorts to do those videos, and they’re gone the next day.

And from the karma files…

Journalists have traditionally kept an arm’s length relationship with lawmakers, but as news outlets continue to shed jobs and fold, press advocates want members of Congress to step in and save the industry from Google and Facebook.

From the Washington Times, HERE. Snerk… If they actually DID real journalism instead of the current MSM left lean and negative stories about anything that doesn’t fit the corporate agenda, they might not be in the deep s**t they are in…

And it looks like the Smithsonian’s revisionist historians have struck again…

This time, with an exhibit of Justice Clarence Thomas that he didn’t know was there, is wrong, and he was never consulted on… Sigh…

Full article, HERE from the Washington Examiner.

Book promo…

Posted on by June 10, 2019

Alma Boykin is first up, with a new installment of her Familiar Series- Clearly Familiar

As always, click on the cover to go to the book on Amazon.

The blurb-

Wandering wolverines, catfish in the sky, owls that can’t fly straight… Welcome back to the Familiar world, where magic and the mundane coexist (and collide).

These short stories introduce some new characters and revisit familiar (and Familiar) ones, including Morgana and Smiley Lorraine, Dr. William Lewis and Blackwell, and Shoshana Langtree. Sorcerers gone mad, heavy weather, and the thin line between insanity and magic, all standard fare in this Familiar place and time. 

Short story set, 47,000 words

A fun little series, with some unexpected twists and turns. Well worth the money!

Next up is Cedar Sanderson’s second in the Witchward series- Possum Creek Massacre

The blurb-

Renowned for her witch hunting skills, Detective Amaya Lombard knew that being summoned from the coastal rainforest of Oregon to the backwoods hollers of Kentucky meant the case was something special. From the moment she arrived at the magic soaked scene in an abandoned farmhouse she knew how bad it was going to be. She had no idea just how complicated it was going to get, professionally and personally. Now she must catch a killer before they catch her. The roots of evil plunge deeply into the past, and the blood soaked history of Kentucky’s witch warded houses and barns may hold the key to keeping her alive in the present.

Intrigue and twists and turns, a great read, as always from Cedar.

Lastly, my friend Neil Hansen has finally written his story about his time with Air America and what came after- Flight- An Air America pilot’s story of adventure, descent, and redemption

The blurb-

In 1964, I embarked on a journey that was to be my life’s adventure.  I hired on as a pilot for Air America and its clandestine operations in Southeast Asia. 

     Flying for the CIA’s secret airline was a dream come true.  Air America’s operations were unknown.  Its schedules were irregular.  Its pilots were shadow people.  It was the world of spooks, covert air ops and adventure.  I had already been a pilot for more than half of my life when I left my home in Detroit for the wild escapades that awaited me in Southeast Asia.  Air America had been the pinnacle of my life and, had the trajectory remained steady, my world and my career should have gone onward and upward from that point. 

     The intent of telling my story is to take the reader on an historical journey of a little-known place in time through my own personal account.  Within the context of history, my narrative is not to be considered anything but my own experience.

     The ranks of Air America were comprised of a host of patriotic professionals who deserve a place of honor in the annals of history.  However, many colorful characters wore the Air America wings, and inside the course of my narrative, the reader will be subjected to people and situations that cannot be filed neatly under anything resembling normal sanity. 

Most names, except those of a known or high-ranking or public nature, and those I wish to recognize for heroic performances, have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.  

This is not a book for the faint of heart. Neil tells his story without sugar coating anything. I’ve known Neil for almost 30 years, and have heard many of these in his own voice. Neil was also written about by Christopher Robbins in the book Air America, which was made into the movie, Air America, starring Robert Downey.

A win for the little guys…

Posted on by June 8, 2019

Alternate title- Karma BITES!

Oberlin College has been fined $11 million in the Gibson Bakery racial profiling case!

An Ohio jury on Friday slapped Oberlin College with an $11.2 million damages penalty for siding with three black students who had claimed they were victims of racial profiling after they were caught shoplifting in 2016, a report said.An Ohio jury on Friday slapped Oberlin College with an $11.2 million damages penalty for siding with three black students who had claimed they were victims of racial profiling after they were caught shoplifting in 2016, a report said.

NY Post article, HERE.

The blog Legal Insurrection has been following this one from basically day 1, and has some excellent reporting, HERE. They also have links to the previous reporting at the bottom of the page. It’s a bit of a time sink, but well worth the read, if for nothing else than the absolute egotism of the university and it’s leaders.

This is one of those cases where the University ‘thought’ they were the big dog, and could do what they wanted…

The jury thought differently, and next week is the punitive damages portion of the sentencing, which could triple the damages. I hope to hell they DO triple the damages. Trying to ruin a 135 year old, 5 generation family business because your students were idiots and shoplifted in the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught is NO excuse.

That the University pandered to the POS (Perpetually Offended Snowflakes) on campus and apparently were actually supported by the dean of students, including the dean handing out flyers AT the bakery, then tried to say it was all ‘First Amendment”, and we didn’t do nuffin…

Granted Oberlin will appeal, and try to drag this out until the family is broke and out of business, but I truly hope this is a wakeup call for those in power that they CAN be held accountable for their actions!

And it’s about damn time!

Random Stuff…

Posted on by June 7, 2019

Appointment at the VA-OKC yesterday, 2 hours up, got there 45 minutes early, soooo… I went to where I ‘thought’ the appointment was, and of course it had moved. The only problem is, they are upgrading/remodeling the VA hospital in OKC. Sigh…

Twenty minutes and thanks to an assistant director, I FINALLY found the right ‘module’ and checked in. I was called 10 minutes before the scheduled time. Same little Vietnamese Doc as last year, she looked me over, grumbled at me, checked two skin spots and kicked me out the door in 20 minutes, and a 2 hour drive home…

I’m actually very happy with the care I’ve gotten at OKC. They keep the appointments running on time, they are courteous, they listen, and actually answer my questions.

And now, a little video to brighten your weekend. A Clydesdale foal’s first time out of the barn! 🙂

Sigh…

Posted on by June 4, 2019

Apparently my post yesterday tripped off the #%*($@ sp*mbots again…

155 and counting as of 10pm last night. Most of them from bk.ru 109.123.118.8, both of which come back as fakes. And the ‘comments’ are all in Russian…

Lovely… It was bad enough when I put up the post about the border, but to get this crap for a post on D-Day?

Unbelievable…

Go read the folks on the sidebar while I clean out the spambox.

 

Operation Overlord…

Posted on by June 4, 2019

Better known as D-Day, took place 75 years ago today.

Into the jaws of death- A LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) from the U.S. Coast Guard-manned USS Samuel Chase disembarks troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division wading onto the Fox Green section of Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944. American soldiers encountered the newly formed German 352nd Division when landing. During the initial landing two-thirds of Company E became casualties.                                    By Chief Photographer’s Mate (CPHoM) Robert F. Sargent

I have talked to veterans who made that landing, and I cannot imagine, even after talking to them, how they managed to steel themselves to take those first steps off the landing craft, much less charge across that beach.

Originally scheduled for 5 June, Mother Nature reared her head, and it had to be postponed a day.

The invasion planners determined a set of conditions involving the phase of the moon, the tides, and the time of day that would be satisfactory on only a few days in each month. A full moon was desirable, as it would provide illumination for aircraft pilots and have the highest tides. The Allies wanted to schedule the landings for shortly before dawn, midway between low and high tide, with the tide coming in. This would improve the visibility of obstacles on the beach, while minimising the amount of time the men would be exposed in the open. Eisenhower had tentatively selected 5 June as the date for the assault. However, on 4 June, conditions were unsuitable for a landing: high winds and heavy seas made it impossible to launch landing craft, and low clouds would prevent aircraft from finding their targets.

It was not just Americans that put their lives on the line that day.

US zones

Commander, First Army (United States): Lieutenant General Omar Bradley. The First Army contingent totalled approximately 73,000 men, including 15,600 from the airborne divisions.

Utah Beach
Omaha Beach

British and Canadian zones

Commander, Second Army (Britain and Canada): Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey. Overall, the Second Army contingent consisted of 83,115 men, 61,715 of them British. The nominally British air and naval support units included a large number of personnel from Allied nations, including several RAF squadrons manned almost exclusively by overseas air crew. For example, the Australian contribution to the operation included a regular Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) squadron, nine Article XV squadrons, and hundreds of personnel posted to RAF units and RN warships. The RAF supplied two-thirds of the aircraft involved in the invasion.

 

Gold Beach
Juno Beach
Sword Beach

79th armoured division badge.jpg 79th Armoured Division provided specialised armoured vehicles which supported the landings on all beaches in Second Army’s sector.

156,000+ men hit those beaches, supported by the invasion fleet, which was drawn from eight different navies, comprised 6,939 vessels: 1,213 warships, 4,126 landing craft of various types, 736 ancillary craft, and 864 merchant vessels.

The butcher’s bill was high. The First U.S. Army, accounting for the first twenty-four hours in Normandy, tabulated 1,465 killed, 1,928 missing, and 6,603 wounded. The after-action report of U.S. VII Corps (ending 1 July) showed 22,119 casualties including 2,811 killed, 5,665 missing, 79 prisoners, and 13,564 wounded, including paratroopers.

  • Canadian forces at Juno Beach sustained 946 casualties, of whom 335 were listed as killed.
  • Surprisingly, no British figures were published, but Cornelius Ryan cites estimates of 2,500 to 3,000 killed, wounded, and missing, including 650 from the Sixth Airborne Division.
  • German sources vary between four thousand and nine thousand D-Day casualties on 6 June—a range of 125 percent. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s report for all of June cited killed, wounded, and missing of some 250,000 men, including twenty-eight generals.
  • French civilian casualties were around 15,000 for the month of June.

(Courtesy of Historyonline.net, HERE)

75 years on, few of the survivors are left, and even fewer will make that trip across the pond again. They truly were the greatest generation of American service men and women for what they did over the 4 years of the war, and especially on 6 June, 1944.

Hand Salute!

Ready, Two.

Really???

Posted on by June 4, 2019

Once again the PC police are at it…

This time over ‘morale’ or theater patches. These are the humorous, sometimes scatalogical patches aircrews wear when overseas or on deployment. And sometimes at home too…

These are some of mine. Bottom middle one is a theater made patch from 1973, and yes, the black patch has ‘something’ on it. 🙂

And this one is a fairly ‘famous’ one among both the Navy and Air Force aircrews world-wide…

But since THIS picture came out, we’re in a SHTF moment as the left melts down.

Courtesy of Blue Lives Matter, we have THIS link to the article. And I just ‘love’ the hypocrisy of Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, who spouts off that the morale patch is illegal, then in the next statement allows as to how ‘he’ wore one, “with his 4 star bosses approval”.

Where’s my BS flag, I know I’ve got it around here somewhere… Oh and the LG is a national security and military analyst for CNN, so we know where ‘his’ loyalties lie, don’t we.

Morale patches and sayings have probably been around as long as there have been military organizations. Remember the iconic ‘comments’ and art on the Vietnam helmets? What about nose art on airplanes? What about crew patches?

Hell, what about squadron patches??? Should they all be this one?

I’m sure they can find people that will be offended by all of the above… It’s time for the military to tell all of them to shove it, and let the kids have their patches. ‘Most’ of the protesters have probably not served, and have no idea about the patch culture, and the amount of work and pleasure the kids get from those patches. I’m betting those were probably made by Tiger down in Okinawa, or the place right out the gate from Atsugi, that I can’t remember the name of…

Keep your @#%*$(# political BS out of the military and let them do their damn jobs!

Grrr…

Posted on by June 3, 2019

The situation on the border is getting #%%(@@ ridiculous. And the pols refuse to jack about it, blaming the president for creating a ‘false’ problem.

If I were him, I’d call the leaders of the house/senate and the Mexican ambassador to the White House. Sitting on the desk would be five dice and a dice cup.

I’d give them six months to pass immigration, get the necessary funding for the wall and adequate personnel, and give the same six months to the ambassador to have Mexico get their act together and stop letting the people through, instead actually obeying the UN asylum rules.

When they start protesting, I’d pick up a die, drop it in the cup, then the next, until all five are in the cup then I’d explain that the first month, the border would be closed on a particular day between the 1st and the 6th for between one and six days. The second month, two dice. Same thing. The third month three dice, the fourth, four dice, the fifth, five dice. And the total number on the second roll would be the number of days the border would be closed.

If at six months, nothing had happened, the border would be closed and remain closed until the immigration and other things  were fixed. Then I’d slam the dice cup down, and throw them out of the office.

Geez… Can’t these f**kers put politics aside for even a f**king WEEK and get shit done? Or do they just not care? I’m about at the point that the Dems and Pubs are nothing but two sides of the same frikkin coin…

Kicking the soapbox back in the corner and going to find my BP meds…

Random thoughts on writing…

Posted on by June 2, 2019

Caveat Emptor…

This is the way ‘I’ do things. I’m not saying it’s the right way or the wrong way. It’s the way that works for me. YMMV, etc.

I guess my philosophy is do the best I can, but don’t be afraid to fail. And I’ve been told I’m more of a ‘storyteller’ than a writer…

Which is one of the reasons I do the amount of research I do. I want the story to be ‘right’…

For example, even thought I know a pretty good bit about guns, if I’m going to write one into a story, I do the research to make sure I get it right. Sometimes, the research takes me down some rat holes that I really don’t need, especially when the ‘good idea fairy’ gets in cahoots with the muse and goes, “Hey, this would be a neat addition to the story.” Ummm… No, it wouldn’t. And it’s going to be one sentence, maybe two, in the novel.

I don’t do infodumps even with the research, because I like to let the reader build the character visualization and descriptions of the ‘world’ they inhabit in their own minds. To me, that gets the reader more involved with the story and vested in the story line.

And speaking of story lines, I have had characters take off in directions that leave me going WTF? Where did that come from… Sigh. I’ve also had ‘minor’ characters that won’t go away, moving up the story hierarchy, or ‘demanding’ a supporting story line of their own. Sometimes that has some interesting impacts… sigh

We had a discussion last night after dinner about beginnings, endings, and the great swampy middle… The beginning is usually pretty easy, the ending can be easy, if you already know where the character(s) are going to end up.

BUT… How they get from the beginning to the end can be ‘interesting’, to put it mildly. More than once, I’ve rearranged chapters, or rewritten them after I moved them in the order of appearance and had to ‘fix’ issues that created, but it (at least to me) made the story better.

Which brings me to another point, I can’t just churn stuff out to ‘get something out there’. And I don’t write linearly, I jump around in my writing, depending on what the muse is giving me that day. And if I get hung up on one story, I have others that I’m also doing, although there is one ‘primary’ story at any given time.

The other thing I try to do is listen to my readers. Sometimes that ends up being a novella, or a short story, like the Rimworld- JACE story, or the one I’m currently working on for John Cronin’s backstory.

Which brings me back around to research. There are significant differences between writing current fiction and military science fiction. Current fiction is easier to research, since you’re looking up things that exist. Science fiction is predicated on ‘guesses’ or extrapolations of what potentially can exist and be useful in the future.

The other thing is looking at existing or newer technology and extrapolating from research being done in those fields. As an example, I’ve never read a novel where there is a good description of ‘how’ all the people on a colony ship are supposed to survive once they get to their planet, (Not saying they aren’t out there, I just haven’t run across them). So I looked at emerging tech and came up with containerized housing, unfold the ‘container’ multiple times and tab ‘A’ goes in slot ‘A’, etc. the second container would contain essentials that don’t fold flat, e.g. kitchen, bathroom/fresher, furniture, etc. Those containers would be tractored onto the colony ship, stacked how ever high it would be necessary, since those ships will probably be assembled in space, etc. Once at the planet, the pair would be tractored down and (some assembly required) become a functional, furnished housing unit.

Lastly, I rely on my alpha and beta readers, along with my commenters to keep me on the straight and narrow, so to speak. They don’t sugarcoat their comments, tell me truthfully when things work, and when they don’t. I would say they are the ‘unsung heroes’, laboring in the background, and all they get is a free book for their trouble. But John Q. Public reaps the reward for their work.

The other thing is conversations with other writers, both informally and through panels and breakouts at Cons. The ability to bounce ideas off other writers is a great help, and it does help you keep your sanity… more or less… 🙂

Oops…

Posted on by June 1, 2019

Busy writing, didn’t have time for a real post, so you get humor…

On the outskirts of a small town, there was a big, old pecan tree just inside the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucketful of nuts and sat down by the tree, out of sight, and began dividing the nuts.

‘One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me,’ said one boy. As they counted them, several of the nuts dropped and rolled down toward the fence.

Another boy came riding along the road on his bicycle. As he passed, he thought he heard voices from inside the cemetery. He slowed down to investigate. Sure enough, he heard, ‘One for you, one for me, one for you, One for me…’

He just knew what it was. He jumped back on his bike and rode off. Just around the bend he met an old man with a cane, hobbling along.

‘Come here quick,’ said the boy, ‘you won’t believe what I heard! Satan and the Lord are down at the cemetery dividing up the souls!’

The man said, ‘Beat it kid, can’t you see it’s hard for me to walk.’ When the boy insisted though, the man hobbled slowly to the cemetery.

Standing by the fence they heard, ‘One for you, one for me. One for you, One for me.’

The old man whispered, ‘Boy, you’ve been tellin’ me the truth. Let’s see if we can see the Lord…

Shaking with fear, they peered through the fence, yet were still unable to see anything. The old man and the boy gripped the wrought iron bars of the fence tighter and tighter as they tried to get a glimpse of the Lord.

At last they heard, ‘One for you, one for me. That’s all.. Now let’s go get those nuts by the fence and we’ll be done….

They say the old man had the lead for a good half-mile before the kid on the bike passed him.