David Gillon

 Given President Bonespurs is whinging about the European nations, and the UK in particular, not queueing up to join the war he started without consulting them*, I thought I'd look up the precise wording of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

"Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked"

Mutual defence against an armed attack on a NATO power in Europe or North America, does not give Trump the right to drag NATO into an offensive war he started in the Gulf, without consulting them, no matter what he might think. 

This is why NATO never got involved in Vietnam, and why Kennedy and Nixon didn't throw a tantrum over it.

Meanwhile there's a pretty good argument Pete Hegseth committed a war crime at his press conference on Friday, which takes a truly special level of stupidity.

Hegseth: "no mercy, no quarter!"*.

Hague Convention of 1907, Regulations: Art. 23: "In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden

....

(d) To declare that no quarter will be given;"

As a former officer Hegseth should know that, and if he doesn't, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, standing next to him, definitely should.

* He may have forgotten accusing all the Coalition powers of staying away from the front lines of Afghanistan just a couple of months ago, but the other NATO nations haven't. As you sow, etc

** At least Hegseth stopped short of yelling "Deus Vult!", but it's still some Crusader-level shit and you can bet the Gulf powers noticed.

Beast Business, Ilona Andrews

The Amazon description says this a novella, but it's actually a shortish novella, a related short story, a short vignette, together with several short stories that were previously on their website. Everything's from their Hidden Legacy world, and if it fits into the existing pattern will be the primer for a trilogy focusing on the third Baylor daughter, Arabella, finding a partner. OTOH, Arabella really only makes a guest appearance in the novella and it instead revolves around a couple of secondary characters from the preceding two trilogies.

Diana Harrison, Prime of House Harrison, needs illusionist prime Augustus Montgomery, Prime of House Montgomery, and owner of massive PI company MII, for an urgent recovery operation. House Harrison's thing is animal magic, and someone has stolen a unique tiger cub from them. They have 24 hours to recover it because it needs its mother's milk, which means Diana needs Augustus personally, and she's coming along whether he likes it or not. But they both have their secrets, including the true nature of their magics, and they're going to have to cooperate closer than Augustus prefers. Shenanigans ensue.

The Masquerades of Spring, Ben Aaronovitch

It's the Roaring Twenties and Augustus Berrycloth-Young is enjoying the high life in New York, ably aided by his American valet Beauregard, and his friend Lucy, who can be trusted to know where all the best Jazz in Harlem can be found. Into Gussie's pleasant idyll comes a reminder that he is a keeper of the sacred flame of the Society of the Wise, in the form of the Folly's top magical troubleshooter, Thomas Nightingale. Nightingale is on a mission, pursuing the origin of an enchanted, possibly cursed, trumpet, and he's absolutely sure Gussie is the man to help him track it down.

I'd say this was meant to be a Jeeves and Wooster homage, Nightingale even introduces Gussie as 'Bertram Wilberforce' at one point, but Beauregard really doesn't get much to do. Instead it's Nightingale, Gussie, Lucy and the mysterious Cocoa against an escalating array of music agents, bent cops, and political operators, all complicated by Gussie trying not to let Nightingale know that he and Lucy - Lucien Biggs - are a couple. But never let it be said that a Berrycloth-Young failed to rise to the occasion!

IOW it's a very atypical Rivers of London novella, but Gussie makes for a thoroughly entertaining narrator.

The Vampire and the Case of the Wayward Werewolf
The Vampire and the Case of the Secretive Siren 
The Vampire and the Case of the Baleful Banshee, Heather G Harris and Jilleen Dolbeare

Think Due South meets Northern Exposure, with the out-of-place protagonist role played by a London partygirl, rather than a Mountie or a doctor.

A fortnight ago Elizabeth Barrington - Bunny to her friends - was a partygirl about town, then she woke up dead and decided a century of servitude to the king of the vampires just wasn't going to happen. Now she's the newest recruit to the police force of the small Alaskan magical town of Portlock, bringing the total strength of the force up to three - Bunny, Gunnar the Nomo (chief of police), and Sidnee, a friendly siren. Bunny was theoretically hired as an admin assistant, but Sidnee mostly mans the office, and one man, even a man-mountain and alleged demi-god like Gunnar, can't manage 24 hour coverage on his own, so pretty soon Bunny, and Fluffy the rather too intelligent Alsatian, are neck deep in a complicated murder case, variously aided and hindered by the town's political movers and shakers, including smooth vampire Connor Mackenzie, rough-and-ready polar bear shifter Stan Ahmaogak, and human hunter Thomas Patkotak.

Book 2 has Bunny being formally sworn in as Officer Bunny, but she's barely had time to get used to that when an encounter with a new drug almost takes out Gunnar, turning Officer Bunny into acting-Nomo Bunny, and leaving her with a drug crisis to take care of, with the competing help of Connor and Stan. Gunnar's back for book 3, but Sidnee's definitely out of sorts, there's an arsonist about town, and there's an escalating series of thefts which threatens to bring down Portlock's protective shield, and there's definitely something dangerous out there in the wilds, waiting for its chance to feed. 

3 down, 9 to go.
 

So she popped out (post Traitors final) to get replacements and then we set about trying to get the thing to reboot.

Cue an hour in her freezing garage arguing about how to interpret Hive's guidance on how to get the thermostat and the boiler to talk to each other again if they aren't speaking. (And it's not just that we were mis-interpreting them, they were seriously crap, for instance a how to reconnect video that showed you there were three different models of thermostat, but then only went through the process for one model, that didn't work in remotely the same way as the model we had).

At midnight, after an hour's trying, I announced I was freezing and I was going back into the warm to read up on the system. 10 minutes later I walked into the hall, held down the reset button on the 'Hive Hub', which is sort of a mini-router, for 10 seconds and the system promptly reconnected itself.

*headdesk*

 My sister and I sat down together to watch the 1st episode of the second season of Patience - autistic criminal records clerk helps the murder team in York catch criminals. Neither of us had watched the first season.

Not bad, the autism seems mostly well handled - the self-help group seemed designed for humour though. The plot had perhaps a little too much reliance on weird science - revolving around someone with Rh-Null blood caught up in fringe medical stuff, though the vampirism red-herring was nicely handled. The second episode has infrasound as a murder weapon, and probably overplayed hyperacusis as a superpower, though it did also spend a lot of time showing how much of a problem it is for Patience.

But immediately the first episode finished, my sister turned to me and exclaimed: "She's exactly like you!"

I didn't answer that until the next day, because I was completely freaked out by how exactly like me she is.

Well Christmas dinner could have been a disaster, but for the fact that my sister decided to cook the turkey joint on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. We popped the turkey into a hot oven after cooking pizza for ourselves and then settled down to watch Red One, which was almost so bad it was good. At the end of the film my sister went to check on the turkey, which was now mildly defrosted, as opposed to piping hot. The oven was just as cold, no matter what the controls said. Cue panic.

Fortunately the oven started heating up again as soon as we started fiddling with knobs, and it was just 10PM, so there was just time to cook it for another 2 hours, this time with frequent checks, and still be in bed before Santa started on his rounds.

Christmas morning we went down to see my mother for a couple of hours, cut slightly shorter than expected because the care home was starting dinner at 12:30 rather than the normal 1PM, but hadn't actually mentioned that to any of the relatives. Mind you we passed the hot food trolleys on the way out and it smelled gorgeous.

So we didn't even start cooking veg etc until after 1PM - I say 'we', but in truth it was almost all my sister, I just helped around the edges. And we finally sat down to eat at 3:30ish, much later than we have in the past. Amazingly the turkey had come through its ordeal of four hours in the oven without drying out.

Apparently Calibri is un-American because it's easier for people with dyslexia to read.

Seriously.

State Department to switch from "woke" Calibri to Times New Roman

Perhaps Rubio should also insist they write everything in BOLD CAPS like the glorious leader?

ETA: what I hadn't noticed initially was that Rubio specifically calls it out for being a DEI_A_ initiative. Apparently accessibility as a whole is now un-American.

 I haven't been able to bring myself to actually read the new US National Security Strategy, but according to reports the highlights from the European perspective appear to be:

Adoption of the White Supremacist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory as official US Government policy.

The US must therefore divorce itself from Europe because some European states might become non-White* majority in the future. (I think the appropriate description for this triumph of logic is utterly barking, the EU states average 5-15% non-EU born citizens, and that includes Brits nowadays, the only exception is Liechtenstein, and that has a population of 40,000, plus the whole international banking and financial services hub thing going on). 

Apparently the US has to protect Europe against 'civilizational erosion' by working to undermine the EU and further the Far Right, because protecting your population against racial hatred is contrary to the sacred principle of free speech.

Meanwhile, South of the Border, they're reinstating the Monroe Doctrine because apparently the South American states need an American guardian to tell them who they can have relations with.

As I said, I'm sorry, but WTAF?!?

* They don't actually say 'non-white', but they're fooling no one.

4AM-ish I wasn't asleep, and heard something which I couldn't work out if it was an aircraft or thunder.

So I popped open the bedroom window to see if it was any clearer that way, just caught the very end of it, and still couldn't tell.

I stood listening for a while, as it's rarely that quiet, and I could hear a freight train going past in the cutting down the hill - you can only really hear the trains at that time of night as otherwise they're drowned out by the traffic noise.

And then, for about 10 seconds, I heard the distinctive clip-clop, clip-clop of horse's hooves. WTF?

If you hear hoofbeats, suspect auditory illusions?

I have no idea what it actually was, but it sounded like hoofbeats. At 4AM.

 After three days in a row of not getting to sleep until after the sun was up (and then being woken mid-morning), I've basically spent the entire day asleep, apart from answering several phone calls from my sister and then almost immediately falling asleep again*.

I answered those sitting cross-legged on the bed, and I fell asleep in that position and then slept that way for several hours. My hips are NOT happy with me.