It’s Mah Birthday, and what I wrote yesterday reminds me of the world I grew up in. It was a good world, and I enjoyed growing up in it. It was a safe world, because we made it so. And I want more people to have that world. I guess that is why I fell so easily into the Neocon umbrella when I was young. We had a good world, and it is our duty to try to help others achieve it. Right? I grew up, and I realized that we can’t do that. Other people have to choose to create that world for themselves. If we try to make it for them, they will not appreciate it enough to defend it themselves when we step away. On my birthday I am thankful to have grown up in a world where those who came before me did defend that peace. And I pray to God we can leave our children a world as good as the one we had.
Eight years ago, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and sent non-uniformed soldiers into two other Ukrainian provinces to help them seek independence from the Ukraine. I wrote at the time that The West was at a point in time that would tell our future. It’s been eight years now, and today we are seeing the fruits of that long labor, both by the Russians and by those who would make foreign policy a club to beat their opponents with in America. Today, the Ukraine is paying the price for all of that. Today, we have to decide how we will react, because our reactions will foretell the world our children grow up in.
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Jesse James had a superpower from Day One. No, it wasn’t being stronger than ten normal men. It also wasn’t being able to regrow lost limbs, though that had been rather useful to him. Farms can be dangerous places, especially during harvest time. The superpower I was thinking about, the one that made him unique in the Cowboys, was cards. Playing cards. I don’t think any of us ever saw him grab them. One instant they were in his pocket, the next they were in his hands being shuffled. And he always knew where every card was. If he dealt them, he knew. No trick like reading them first or any of that garbage. We could give him new cards, never let him examine them, just shuffle and deal, and he knew which person had which cards. Never saw anything like it before. It’s how he got his first callsign from us. Cards.
Jesse James is built like a comic book superhero. I’m not joking. Growing up on a farm is not easy. The weight of responsibility breeds hard men with strong muscles, broad shoulders, and chiseled jaws. In Jesse’s case at least. A narrow waist, brown hair the color of Kansas dirt, and bright blue eyes complete the look that most guys have to be sculpted to get. But the smile he wears most of the time causes most people to underestimate him. They think the only thing he’s in danger of annihilating is a good steak, like a regular Clark Kent or something. He actually grew a goatee to look a little bit more dangerous. He shaved that off after War’s End of course. But I’ll always remember him like that.
Jesse James, no relation to the historical figure that I know of, was one of the most normal Cowboys we ever had. I have no idea how he got roped in with the rest of us crazies. He was an honest-to-God dirt-grubbing farmer from Kansas when Yosemite fell. Grew up not far from Old Fort Hays. That would be the city not the orbital defense platform. The prairie fires burned his farm to the dirt and he needed money to rebuild. That was his reason for volunteering to serve. I kid you not. He had no grand mission to kill every Shang he could. No tragic story of lost loved ones and swearing missions of revenge against those who wronged him. He just needed money to rebuild the farm. And somehow he got roped in with all the juvenile delinquents and rich Family kids that got routed to the Cowboys. God works in mysterious ways.

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