Paradise Lost…

Posted on by November 12, 2018

California is burning again, still… As a former volunteer in Florida, I feel for them. The longest one I was ever involved with was three continuous days, and I was totally whipped. These folks haven’t had a break all summer, and that takes a toll on the psyche.

And the death toll continues to climb in the Camp Fire, which is in Butte County, CA. The towns of Paradise and Magalia are basically gone, and the death toll is continuing to rise, HERE. When you get a fire that ‘blows up’ like that one, you just have to get out of the way, and try to make rescues where you can. If you get in front of it, you’re dead.

I was talking to PP last night, and this one hits close to home for a number of reasons. My ex-wife and her husband lost their house, burnt to the ground, and no insurance because it was paid for and in a ‘fire zone’… 27 of PP’s ambulance company employees out of 100 total have also lost houses. Some of them literally have the uniforms on their backs and that is it. But they are still providing ambulance services, and assisting in the searches for survivors. And most of the police/fire forces in the area are also homeless, losing their homes while they saved others.

PP got up there yesterday, and sent pictures, and we talked about the ‘oddities’ that happen in fires like this. A plastic deer in a yard with the house burned. All but one house in an entire subdivision gone.  One store standing alone. The ambulance company lost two stations in Paradise, one at the fire house, and a secondary in a strip mall, both burned to the ground, and one ambulance that got trapped, but the medics and patient were saved.

That fire is getting less coverage than the one down in Malibu, because it’s just regular people, nobody famous or rich… But they did bring in heavy airborne units yesterday, and as of last night it was 25% contained, which means they’ll be fighting that one for another month.

California has had ‘problems’ with forestry management for decades, a lot of it due to regulations and econazis. Now they are paying for it in lives, homes, and businesses lost. Two articles, HERE and HERE.

Edit- They have put up a GoFundMe, HERE, to help employees get necessities.

Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month…

Posted on by November 10, 2018

Words that bring a chill to anyone who studies history… 9,000,000 overall war dead, 21,000,000 wounded, 117,000 Americans dead and 5,700,000 civilians estimated dead…

At 5 a.m. that morning, November 11th, 1918, Germany, out of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. The decision was made to hold the notification of the signing until 1100 to provide the symmetry that we know today.

It all started on June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was shot to death with his wife by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

It led to trench warfare, biowarfare, with the gassing of troops on both sides, and battles across Europe and the Mediterranean, including the infamous Battle of Gallipoli, searing that name for every in the history of Australia and New Zealand, HERE.

Germany, France, Britain, and other countries lost pretty much an entire generation of young men, and scars from WWI still mar the landscape in Europe. Supposedly the war to end all wars, sadly became merely a prelude to WWII, around 20 years later.

My dad served in WWI as a rifle and pistol instructor at Camp Beauregard in Louisiana, because he was an expert with rifle and pistols prior to joining the Army. He also suffered from Influenza during the time, and that may have contributed to his early death in 1959.

The first unknowns were selected from among the British, French, and American war dead.

Following the custom inaugurated by other allied countries in World War I the Congress on March 4, 1921, approved a Resolution providing for the burial in Arlington National Cemetery Memorial Amphitheater on Armistice Day 1921 of an unknown and unidentified American soldier of World War I. The Secretary of War delegated to the Quartermaster Corps the duty of selecting the Unknown Soldier and accordingly the Quartermaster General directed the Chief, American Graves Registration Service in Europe to select from among the burials of America’s Unknown Dead the bodies of four who fell in the combat area in order that one from among them could be anonymously designated as the one for burial in accordance with the provisions of the Resolution. Four bodies of Unknown Soldiers were selected, one from each of the following cemeteries Aisne-Marne, Meuse-Argonne, Somme and St. Mihiel–and brought to Chalons where they were placed in the Hotel de Ville. The fact that the bodies selected were those of Americans was determined by the location of place of death, original burial and uniforms. The utmost care was taken to see that there was no evidence of identification on the bodies selected and no indication that their identity could ever be established.

After the four bodies were arranged in the Hotel de Ville, the next step was the matter of selecting the one from among them to represent all the Unknown American Dead. This ceremony though simple was most impressive. In view of his outstanding service,  Sergeant Edward Younger, on duty with the American Forces in Germany, was given the honor of making the final selection. On Monday morning, October 24, 1921, at 10 :00 A.M. in the presence of The Quartermaster General, the Commanding General of the American Forces in Germany, the Mayor of Chalons-sur-Marne, high officers of the French Army, distinguished French citizens and eminent American and French civilians the selection was made. While a French military band played an appropriate air, Sergeant Younger slowly entered the room where the four caskets were placed. Passing between two lines formed by the officials he silently advanced to the caskets, circled them three times and placed a spray of white roses on the third casket from the left. He then faced the body, stood at attention, and saluted. He was immediately followed by officers of the French Army who saluted in the name of the French people.

The rest of that story is HERE.

TODAY is the day to thank those veterans, and say a prayer for those currently serving in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. To my fellow veterans, I would propose the toast, “Absent Comrades.”

And to the families- No one says thank you for your sacrifice. So let me say thank you to all of the significant others that hold the fort down while we go on long deployments. Thank you for putting up with all the moves. Thanks to all of the dependents who step up and do the extra chores around the house. When the veteran is deployed the budget has to be stretched. The significant other becomes the banker. Thanks to all of the families that hope for only good news. Thank you families for your service.

And to my shipmates in the P-3 all those years, and those onstation today…

Here we go again…

Posted on by November 9, 2018

Florida, Georgia, and Arizona can’t seem to be able to ‘count’ votes accurately…

It’s amazing how they keep ‘finding’ votes, the preponderance of which seem to always favor Dems for some reason…

One of the Dems lawyers in Florida actually said yesterday, “I’m here to win the election.”

Shades of 2000, 2014, and 2016… Sigh…

I’m going to quit before I start using four letter words. YMMV, take your BP meds, and a deep breath. There isn’t crap any of us can do. As a friend said, “It’s in the margin of cheat.”

Musings…

Posted on by November 7, 2018

As an old fart, retired military, and retired .gov contractor, I don’t have a lot left…

BUT, I have always prided myself on three things, my honesty, my integrity, and my professionalism. When you come right down to it, that is what makes me who I am, and marks what I stand for.

Honesty- Be free from fraud or deception : legitimate, truthful

Integrity- The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness

Professionalism- The competence or skill expected of a professional

Yes, honesty and integrity are ‘interchangeable’ to an extent, but they are two different approaches.

Most of that comes from my family and the way I was raised. It was ‘fine tuned’ by my military career as an aviator. You tell the truth, you own up to your mistakes, you don’t jeopardize others by ‘ignoring’ things, and most importantly, you take care of your sailors.

When you go into the ‘real world’ outside the military, it’s professionalism that gets reviewed the most. You take the man’s money, you give the man an honest day’s work, first and foremost. That is the basis for your reputation. If you make agreements, you do your damndest to stand by those agreements, that’s the second part- Can you be trusted. The third part is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching. That’s taking care of your people, not for praise, but because it’s the right thing to do. The same with people you work with outside your organization. It’s loyalty up, and the expectation you will have loyalty down (seems to be passe today, sadly).

Sadly, I don’t see a lot of these ‘values’ in the younger generation. Both my daughters have thanked me for the way they were raised. I didn’t hide things from them, or try to ‘protect’ them from the real world. Things happen. I never ignored those things, they were dealt with openly, even when they weren’t pretty, or necessarily things young girls should be seeing. Of course that’s caused them some problems, since they adopted ‘my’ attitudes, which don’t necessarily agree with those of their peers… Sorry kids.

None of us are irreplaceable, it’s like the bucket full of water. Stick your finger in, you displace a little water (very little), pull your finger out, there is maybe ‘one’ ripple, but there is no hole in the water. Once you accept that, and the fact that regardless of how good you are, there is always somebody better, life gets a lot easier.

Too many people put so much pressure on themselves they literally work themselves into serious medical issues, or they collapse under the pressure, which can take many forms, including ‘go along to get along’, or ‘don’t rock the boat’, especially in the work environment.

I would end this rambling with this old analogy.

Put a frog in a vessel of water and start heating the water. As the temperature of the water rises, the frog is able to adjust its body temperature accordingly. The frog keeps on adjusting with increase in temperature…

Just when the water is about to reach boiling point, the frog is not able to adjust anymore… At that point the frog decides to jump out… The frog tries to jump but is unable to do so, because it has lost all its strength in adjusting with the rising water temperature…

Very soon the frog dies. What killed the frog? Many of us would say the boiling water…

But the truth is what killed the frog was its own inability to decide when it had to jump out. We all need to adjust with people and situations, but we need to be sure when we need to adjust and when we need to confront/face.

There are times when we need to face the situation and take the appropriate action… If we allow people to exploit us physically, mentally, emotionally or financially, they will continue to do so…

We have to decide when to jump. Let us jump while we still have the strength.

Now back to the regularly scheduled brain drivel… 🙂

Well crap…

Posted on by November 6, 2018

We knew this kind of law wasn’t going to end well…

Two Anne Arundel County police officers serving one of Maryland’s new “red flag” protective orders to remove guns from a house killed a Ferndale man after he refused to give up his gun and a struggle ensued early Monday morning, police said.

The subject of the protective order, Gary J. Willis, 60, answered his door in the 100 block of Linwood Ave. at 5:17 a.m. with a gun in his hand, Anne Arundel County police said. He initially put the gun down next to the door, but “became irate” when officers began to serve him with the order, opened the door and picked up the gun again, police said.

Full article, HERE.

Note the time- 0517. You come knocking on my door that time of the morning, I’d be answering with a gun too! There’s apparently more to this than meets the eye, but I have a feeling it’ll be buried quickly by the MD dems. MD is very tight on guns, and is ‘may’ (read pretty much never) issue state.

h/t Stretch

 

Election day!!!

Posted on by November 5, 2018

Find out where your polling place is, if you don’t already know it. Get your ass out of that chair and get out the door.

I voted early, and only once. But then I’m an Independent, and actually obey the laws… 🙂

This election IS important!

A couple to think about…

Posted on by November 4, 2018

And this one is verified by a number of other folks… sigh…

GOODBYE TO CALIFORNIA

Written by Dr. Ron Martinelli

(Dr. Martinelli is a renowned forensic criminologist and retired police detective with the San Jose Police Department).  

  As I sit in the LAX terminal after concluding business in downtown Los Angeles for the past two days, I cannot help but reflect upon my journey from a once California native to a new resident of the Great State of Texas and why.  You see, in my personal and professional opinion, the once great State of California has in essence become a third world country.

“The concept of the “third world” has evolved to describe countries that suffer from low economic development, high levels of poverty and little to no ability to utilize natural or economic resources.”  French demographer Alfred Sauvey, 1952.

While the reasons for California’s ever-spiraling downwards status from 1st World economic prominence and prosperity to near 3rd World malaise are many;  I will assert that when you combine uber-liberal politicians, with rich elitist Hollywood Celebrities, dotcom CEO billionaires, disengaged millennials and illegal aliens; you in effect create the circumstances where your city or state becomes a 3rd World environment.

The process of California’s demise from the “Golden State” to 3rd World status has been slow but steady; supported and enabled by the aforementioned actors.  While much of the legislated changes for the worse have been designed and voted in by politicians in Sacramento; municipal politicians and a complicit uninformed, naive and entitled voting public must also share blame.  After all, when 51% of those on some type of government subsidy out-vote the 49% of the money earning and tax paying citizenry, any state is doomed to failure.  With California now a “Sanctuary State” and their libtard Democratic state legislature pushing for voting rights for illegal aliens, the state will never recover.

My observations during my short visit to Los Angeles underscored many of the problems Californians are facing as they follow lemming-like their Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, their Democratic legislators and urban mayors like Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles off the economic cliff. Literally nothing substantive is good about L.A. anymore.  An ever-growing homeless subculture populates the downtown area.  The intoxicated, drug influenced, mentally impaired and criminals are everywhere.  They literally surround Civic Center, federal buildings and courts – the so-called foundations and protectors of the Rule of Law and society.  

How ironic to be surrounded by the failures these very systems, liberal politicians and judges have created.  Isn’t karma interesting to watch in real time?

The homeless, numbering in the thousands, sleep in the shadows of immense, gleaming edifices owned by multi-billion dollar international conglomerates and dotcom corporations. Business executives in Brioni suits and workers quickly pass by the unwashed masses, while holding their noses to screen out the stench of urine and feces.  The obvious health and safety hazards to the public are too many to count.

Interconnecting Los Angeles city roadways and state highways designed to transport the commuting, tax paying public to their job sites are a debacle.  The ribbons of roadways are a mess of potholed, weed infested, trash laden, graffiti vandalized passages filled with vehicles lined up bumper-to-bumper going nowhere fast.  These are your tax dollars at work.  While California voters grumble and groan, in the end they just seem to accept their fate as one of the prices to pay for living the California dream.

You see, the working public has no time to get out and protest the outrageous and constant increases in taxes on gas, municipal services, vehicle registrations, rapid transit and a bullet train going to nowhere.  Only the unemployed, government subsidized masses have time to demonstrate in the streets to ensure that their subsidies continue.  Since the liberal politicians in Sacramento know this dynamic and their power base all too well, the taxation without representation continues.  I was staying at a hotel near LAX and my mileage commute to downtown L.A. was a mere twelve miles.  However, it took me every bit of one hour and twenty minutes to arrive at my destination. I then paid $20 for the privilege of parking my car in a public lot.  Of course, this was after I paid $30 a day to park my rental car at my hotel.  Nice.  I’m seriously considering Uber next time.

Since I frequently travel throughout California on business, I will tell you that Los Angeles is a mirror image of all of the other large urban cities in the state.  I have observed similar and even worse depressed and dysfunctional urban environments in the San Francisco Bay Area, Orange County, San Diego and a number of other cities. California is rapidly becoming a two-tiered society of the very rich and the very poor, similar to the 2nd and 3rd World countries I regularly visit.  The middle class, small business owners and the retired are either being pushed out of state and/or escaping in droves to such tax free, business friendly and less crime ridden states such as Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Florida.  Lame duck Gov. Moonbeam and the state’s liberal Democratic legislature know this.  They just don’t care because their power base is now assured  Just ask any of their castrated, powerless Republican colleagues.

There will never again be a Republican administration in California.  The days of Ronald Reagan have long passed.  The candidates lining up for the governor’s race in 2018 are Open Borders and Sanctuary State advocates Anthony Villaraigosa and Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom.  Governor Brown and his Democratic legislature are pulling out all the stops creating legislation that will allow illegal aliens in the state to vote in state and local elections.  Republicans, conservatives and moderates don’t stand a chance.

Here are just some of things Californian’s have done in recent years to turn their state into a 3rd World mess:

  1. Passed Proposition 47 which has since freed tens of thousands of felons from state prisons and county jails back into communities.
  2. Prop. 47 also eviscerated the parole enforcement agency and created a system where police on the streets can’t even enforce outstanding felony and misdemeanor warrants anymore.  
  3. Police no longer arrest people for being under the influence of dangerous drugs.  What would be the point; it’s just a misdemeanor. 
  4. They have reduced the crime of auto theft to a citable misdemeanor.  Steal a car; get caught and get a ticket.  Commit non-violent crimes, get arrested and you are out the same day with a promise to appear in court that will not ever be enforced.  No warrant enforcement, remember?  Amazing!

California’s new “Sanctuary State” status supports and enables its Open Borders mentality.  Police in a number of cities such as San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles are ordered not to assist ICE with border enforcement.  Remember the Kate Steinle murder case where her five-time convicted criminal and deported illegal alien was acquitted?  Well, that’s the political mentality that created that circumstance.  This is also an excellent example that liberal politicians in California are willing to sacrifice the innocent to demonstrate that they support violent illegal alien criminals.

What happens in California’s larger cities filters down to its medium and small sized cities as well.  I recently wrote about the city of Salinas, CA.  that experienced an incredible 150% increase in its homicide rate from 2014 – 2015 which rated Salinas as one of the nation’s 30 most violent cities.  Fifty percent of all of their murders were gang and drug related, with the predominate population of gang members being illegal aliens.  I can only wonder how Silicon Valley dot-commers’ who are paying over half a million bucks for a home and commute over four hours a day to San Jose like living in that violent environment?

Which brings me back to why my successful business owner wife and I escaped to Texas.  The state loves us  No commute problems, no state taxes and we live in an area where there is little to no crime.  Our area just outside of San Antonio some of the best school districts in the U.S.; high employment, great people and lots of fun things to do.

My wife and I live a great life on a ranch with a river in our backyard where we can fish, swim, kayak and BBQ with family and neighbors anytime we want.  The price?  Less than you would pay for a one bedroom studio condo in any of the cities in California I’ve mentioned.  New home buyers only need three percent down to purchase a home and veterans make no down payments.  If you are a younger middle-class person, a small business owner or retired, you’d be nuts to remain in California.

With California over a trillion dollars in debt and 30% of their budget going to subsidizing illegal aliens at the expense of hard-working, taxpayers who have little to no voice on how their state is run, the state and the majority of their citizens are doomed  That’s what a two-tiered society eventually creates. 

One heck of a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY!

The truth is blatantly obvious… and yet the left STILL turns a blind eye.   I say let this Titanic sink.

It’s no wonder anyone with any sense is leaving… But sadly, they are trying their damnest to turn the states they’re going to into another California…

Voter suppression…

Posted on by November 3, 2018

By another means???

Interesting to note that last Wednesday/Thursday all of the MSM came out almost simultaneously with almost identical articles on how the Dems were going to take 40 seats next Tuesday, saying the races were ‘all over’. This was combined with Pelosi going on some TV program saying she IS going to be the next speaker. The logical extension was don’t bother voting, it’s a done deal…

Kinda reminds me of 2000 and the voter suppression of the military absentee ballots- When the NYT admits it’s as bad as they did in the article, you can take a guess at how bad it really was, HERE. And CNN et al tried to call Florida for Gore before the polls had even closed in Escambia County (Pensacola), which is what swung Florida to Bush. And the MSM was quickly calling states for Gore, while suppressing the calls for states where Busy was winning. That went on most of the night.

We’re already hearing how two ‘districts’ in VA and one in Kentucky will ‘decide’ the races nationally, saying they will presage the democrats blue wave.

I’m to the point that I believe they should NOT be able to ‘call’ races until the morning of 7 November, AFTER everyone has actually voted.

On another note, there is this video from Project Veritas…  Robert ‘Beto’ O’Rourke’s (4th gen Irish, without a lick of Hispanic background), whose campaign workers spending campaign funds illegally for the illegals, apparently WITH the blessing of the campaign manager Jody Casey.

The TL:DR is:

“I just hope nobody that’s the wrong person finds out about this.”

“It’s f***ing happening.” O’Rourke Campaign Staff Uses Pre-Paid Cards for Honduran Alien Supplies

“Don’t ever repeat this…” Campaign Staffers Explain How to Hide Campaign Expenditures for Aliens

“If you get caught in some sort of violation that’s like a $50,000 fine,” “For me I can just ignore the rules and I’m like f**k it.”

Staffer Says She Sent Texts to Director; Told Campaign Manager Jody Casey, Who Says “Don’t Worry”

If a Republican had been caught like this, it would be page 1, and the lead on every newscast simultaneously! A Dem? Crickets… Project Veritas caught Gillum’s campaign in Florida doing something similar, and ‘that’ individual was let go, with the campaign complaining the video was racist… Sigh…

As far as I’m concerned, the slogan should be VETO Beto… Seems that ‘most’ of his money has come from the left coast and NYC. An interesting note, his ads ONLY appear on national TV, whereas Ted Cruz is running his ads on local channels.

As for his being called ‘Kennedyesque’, not so much, other than family bailing his ass out and keeping him out of jail at least twice…

I know…

Posted on by November 2, 2018

I’m old and grumpy, okay???

But dammit, Christmas crap isn’t supposed to be on the shelves until AFTER Thanksgiving, FFS…

Grumble… I know they market Christmas stuff year round, and there are locations that have ‘Christmas Stores’, especially in tourist areas that are open year round, but what happened to having time to celebrate Thanksgiving?

The ‘history’ of Thanksgiving in the US is interesting, from Wiki.

In the United States, the modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition is traced to a sparsely documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts, and also to a well recorded 1619 event in Virginia. The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest. Pilgrims and Puritans who began emigrating from England in the 1620s and 1630s carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England. The 1619 arrival of 38 English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia, concluded with a religious celebration as dictated by the group’s charter from the London Company, which specifically required “that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned … in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Several days of Thanksgiving were held in early New England history that have been identified as the “First Thanksgiving”, including Pilgrim holidays in Plymouth in 1621 and 1623, and a Puritan holiday in Boston in 1631. According to historian Jeremy Bangs, director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, the Pilgrims may have been influenced by watching the annual services of Thanksgiving for the relief of the siege of Leiden in 1574, while they were staying in Leiden. Now called Oktober Feesten, Leiden’s autumn thanksgiving celebration in 1617 was the occasion for sectarian disturbance that appears to have accelerated the pilgrims’ plans to emigrate to America. Later in Massachusetts, religious thanksgiving services were declared by civil leaders such as Governor Bradford, who planned the colony’s thanksgiving celebration and fast in 1623. The practice of holding an annual harvest festival did not become a regular affair in New England until the late 1660s.

Thanksgiving proclamations were made mostly by church leaders in New England up until 1682, and then by both state and church leaders until after the American Revolution. During the revolutionary period, political influences affected the issuance of Thanksgiving proclamations. Various proclamations were made by royal governors, John Hancock, General George Washington, and the Continental Congress, each giving thanks to God for events favorable to their causes. As President of the United States, George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide thanksgiving celebration in America marking November 26, 1789, “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God”. Franklin D. Roosevelt finally proclaimed the fourth Thursday in November as the ‘official’ day in December 1941.

OBTW, we aren’t the only country that celebrates it…

I ‘think’ part of the problem is that it was originally a day to give ‘thanks’ to God for the Pilgrim’s survival, in addition to being a day to give thanks for the harvest. Since it’s ‘tied’ to Christians, may are trying to minimize it… Sigh…

 

Book Promos…

Posted on by November 1, 2018

More promos for indie authors! 🙂

First up Celia Hays and Leanne Hayden’s seventh book in the Chronicles of Luna City- Luna City Lucky Seven

Click on the covers to go to the Amazon links!

The blurb-

Welcome to Luna City, Karnes County, Texas … Population 2,456, give or take! Fugitive former celebrity chef Richard Astor-Hall has become a valued member of the community, expanding service at the Café, keeping company with local ace reporter Kate Heisel, and training his new assistant cook, Luc Massie, part-time drummer for the punk rock band OPM. Trouble is brewing when Luc falls in love with the daughter of Sook Walcott, the most ferocious tiger-mother in Luna City … and progress of renovating the historic old Cattleman Hotel has slowed to a standstill. And is Richard’s past about to catch up to him, once again, when his old flame comes to Luna City to get married to someone else? All these questions and more will be answered in this, the seventh Luna City chronicle.

Next up is another short from Cedar Sanderson- Lab Gremlins

The blurb-

All Steven wanted was a lab job to get experience. His boss acted like a mad scientist, but that wasn’t the problem. No, the problem started with disappearances around the lab, and then it really escalated. Steven finds himself scrambling to cope with gremlins, chemical spills, and much worse things when the government agents show up… because they are recruiting and don’t take no for an answer!

And last, but not least, Laura Montgomery’s Mercenary Calling

The blurb-

Exoplanets. Terrorists. Lawyers…

Calvin Tondini has his first client, but he may be in over his head.

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

Despite a somewhat spontaneous approach to his own career, life, and limb, Calvin intends to map a more cautious path for his new client. Captain Nigmatullin, however, shows an unnerving penchant for talk shows—appearing on them, that is—and otherwise ignoring her attorney’s sober counsel.

How can Calvin ensure his client’s freedom when death stalks the Aeneid’s crew, and Nigmatullin herself hides secrets from everyone, even her lawyer?