Book Promos…

Short stories today…

First up, Laura Montgomery’s short, Rapunzel. And it’s free right now on Amazon!

As always, click on the cover to get it!

The blurb-

First contact.

First sacrifice.
First answers.
FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists. Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence.

A short story.

Next is my friend Monalisa Foster’s short story Equality: A short story.

She has posted on her blog, HERE, so it’s also free. I will warn you it is graphic and troubling in some aspects, but I highly recommend it, because she IS telling the truth.

Busy writing…

So you get these…

I did this one yesterday morning and it is in response to Swalwell, the left coast congresscritter…

And this one is damned true!!!

A lot of folks are bailing today for Thanksgiving, so please drive/travel safe! We want you back next week! Now get off the damn net and go spend time with family!!!

Death toll continues to rise…

The Camp Fire death toll is now up to 76, but there are significant issues facing the search teams. If the rains come in as scheduled, they can potentially wash away evidence, or melt the ashes and bone fragments into something approaching concrete, making it damn near impossible to figure out what is what.

Full story, HERE.

While the finger pointing continues as to the cause/effects that led to the fire, the people of Chico and surrounding areas have stepped up and are doing their best to cope with/support the 52000 displaced people.

My hat is off to them, and prayers for those who lost families, homes, and everything but the clothes on their backs.

Stupid…

Apparently a ‘private’ federal prison in Kansas is about to get its ass handed to it, along with the release of multiple inmates over recording of attorney/client phone calls…

The federal public defender’s office has asked for the release of 67 inmates from a Kansas federal prison and plans to seek freedom for more than 150 others because authorities secretly recorded conversations between prisoners and their attorneys that are supposed to be private.

Most of the federal inmates are being held on drug or firearms-related cases.

Full article, HERE.

And apparently this is now TWO years after the original investigation started, HERE.

Grrr… For profit prisons are NOT covering themselves in glory. A quick google search turns up almost 20 MILLION hits for private prison problems, ranging from food, to health care (lack of), to misbehaving guards, etc.

Prison isn’t supposed to be a five star experience, and as much as we dislike it, they do still have rights, but damn… the stupid of these administrators and ‘wardens’… Really?

This…

Is why I don’t trust a damn one of those idjits on the left…

The Democratic congressman’s comments were prompted by a Twitter user’s response to an article about Swalwell’s call to force gun owners to relinquish assault weapons. 

He’s trying to play it off as ‘sarcasm’, but he actually is willing to nuke US citizens who won’t give up their guns…

Full article, HERE.

This is the kind of crap that IS going to lead to people getting shot. The dems and liberals are now pretty much out in the open with their anti-gun agenda, and it’s not pretty. IMHO, they can and will do anything within their power to criminalize lawful gun owners, and do away with 2A.

And HERE is his twitter exchange with Dana Loesch, where he can’t/won’t answer her question about confiscation and calibers…

It’s going to be a long two years. Sigh…

And check out Lagniappe’s Lair, HERE. He’s reporting from the border… And it’s the straight story, NOT PC media BS…

Sigh…

Cool kids these days… It’s not all tac clothes, beards, and tats that set you apart.

You AREN’T the be all to end all.

It’s that old man in the guayabera shirt and walker with the Korea hat that you damn near knocked over then laughed about as you left the grocery store with your beer. That bulge on his hip wasn’t a cell phone, that was in his shirt pocket. And the back of his hat said Marines.

He saw more death and did more in Korea than you’ve done in however many deployments you’ve made downrange. He did it on his own two feet, mile after mile, in the dead of winter. Not in an up armored Hummer or MRAP. I could go on, but you disgusted me with your hot shit attitudes yesterday.

You really need to learn a little humility. Spit…

Kicking the soap box back in the corner.

Random Stuff…

First up, an interesting take on the incoming Dem freshmen, from the Victory Girls blog, HERE.

The Camp Fire in northern California continues to claim more lives, HERE. I will be truly surprised if the final total is less than 200… 8000+ homes destroyed, 2000+ businesses destroyed, and over 52000 people homeless or displaced. There is apparently word going around that it may be a month or more before anyone can get back in, other that officials, due to continuing hotspots, gas leaks, and downed power lines.

The closest ‘big’ town is Chico, and they are doing the best they can, but that number of people all descending on them for services, etc. is overwhelming all of their services capacity. Apparently if you can get registered with FEMA, it’s taking two or more days to get a return call. And apparently one of the shelters where folks are staying now has a norovirus running rampant. My prayers go out to them, and to those helping to have patience, on both sides. Anger and aggression aren’t going to do anyone any good, and the LEOs are already on edge.

And this one is really scary, and a couple of counties over. A serial killer who may have killed up to 90 women over forty years, across the nation, HERE.

Then there is the weather… Colder, not warmer… More snow, earlier, HERE. This is for the NE corridor, and it’s raw, not hockey sticked or modeled, it’s ACTUAL data… Sigh

And some strange voting in Maine. I’ve never heard of ‘ranked choice’ before. I didn’t know that was even legal, HERE.

And this isn’t even getting into the Florida, Georgia, and California messes…

Y’all have a good weekend!

The end of an era???

It looks like one more ‘old school’ beer may be going away…

PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon for you kids, is in a lawsuit with Miller/Coors over continuation to brew PBR. Apparently Miller/Coors has been brewing PBR for a number of years (I quit drinking a long time ago, so haven’t bought beer for years, and didn’t know that).

Full article, HERE from Time.

PBR, like Fallstaff, Jax, Schlitz, and Primo (Hawaii) weren’t ‘good’ beers, but they were cheap, and cheap was good when we were 18 or so. PBR is about the only one left, and I do remember it was a ‘favorite’ during Vietnam, because the cans were steel, and made great ‘repair’ material for patching bullet holes in helicopters…

We eventually graduated, if you will, to long neck Lone Star, and the occasional Coors when somebody could get it…

Which reminds me of a funny story, back in the 70’s, Coors wasn’t sold east of the Mississippi, or west of the left coast. The USSS had just been caught smuggling Coors from California back to DC on Air Force One, and it’d been written up in all the papers. BUT, if you went to the Coastie Club at Barber’s Point, they had Coors, funny that… We were transiting back to Hawaii through Moffett Field one time, and as we taxied out, we saw a flat bed semi pull up behind a Coastie C-130, it was loaded with pre-palletized cases of Coors!!! And there were four or five of the big pallets ready to be loaded!!!

Went by the Coastie ramp the next day, and sure enough, that BUNO airplane was sitting in the parking area. And the club had Coors that night (I think you were limited to 2 cans per person).

Can’t say the Coasties didn’t take care of their troops… 🙂

Another one goes to prison!!!

Another corrupt stain on the Navy is going to jail! This time a senior enlisted!

Indicted a few months ago, along with a Commander and another senior enlisted, HERE.

A retired master chief pleaded guilty in San Diego last week to taking kickbacks and became the latest casualty in the Navy’s ongoing “Fat Leonard” public corruption scandal.

Ricarte I. David, 61, copped to one count of conspiracy to commit honest services fraud on Sept. 5, less than a month after prosecutors unveiled a grand jury indictment against him, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Full article, HERE.

There are more to go, and I for one, am glad to see the Navy continuing to go after these bastards and openly prosecuting them, not trying to hide it! This is the ONLY way this kind of crap gets stopped!

The truly sad part is the number of years this apparently went on, with mostly officers turning a blind eye/taking bribes that put sailors at risk, and literally cost the Navy millions of dollars…

Book Promos…

Cyn Bagley has another short story up- The Utter Truth.

As always, click on the cover to go to the Amazon page

The blurb-

“I dream in red.”
In a land where predators are the boogie-man, what kind of job can a lion get?

David Tatum has a story, A Gun for Shalla, in the anthology Fantastic Defenders.

The Blurb-

Across astounding and magical worlds, five heroes step forward to defend against magical threats:

  • A sorceress in a besieged city faces a malignant force even more dangerous than the city’s would-be conquerors.
  • An unassuming bureaucrat stumbles upon a threat to a vast empire and deals with it in his own inimitable fashion.
  • A resourceful bodyguard for an infant princess, trapped and surrounded by merciless assassins, finds a unique way to hold them at bay.
  • A mage press-ganged into the Royal Navy finds himself volunteered for a dangerous secret mission on foreign soil.
  • A disgraced royal guardian who failed in protecting his king hunts down those who cost him his honor.

These are the…FANTASTIC DEFENDERS!

Alma Boykin has the final book in her Powers trilogy out- Against a Rising Tide

The blurb-

The World War has ended. The battles rage on.

Five years after the end of the World War, men, Half-Dragons and True-Dragons labor to repair the damage. The English and French insist on punishing the nations of the Habsburg Confederation and Germany, while nationalists and Communists threaten to tear the alliance and the Houses apart from within. As chaos swirls and tensions rise, István Eszterházy and Archduke Rudolph von Habsburg struggle to preserve order, and to preserve both Houses and Powers. Worse, an old enemy from the war stalks István, intent on revenge.

But true danger lurks to the east. The forces that destroyed Galicia threaten to devour all of the Powers and Houses, killing the very soil of the land as they do. As another war rages, István and Rudolph must hide the secret of the Powers from forces more terrible than the Mongols and ottomans combined.

And last, but not least, Margaret Ball has a new book in the Applied Topology series out- A Creature of Smokeless Flame.

The blurb-

Thalia Kostis and her cohort knew the CIA was funding their group of research mathemagicians, but they’d never demanded results like this before! After terrorists use magic to kidnap hostages from the agency’s headquarters, the Center for Applied Topology finds themselves torn from their cubicles and dragged across three continents, from holding cells to terrorist safehouses as the superiors who never believed in them before are now demanding impossible results.

Now academics who can’t organize a donut run are finding out there are worse fates than loss of funding… If they don’t find and stop the magicians responsible, they’re going to lose their lives!