Jack of Harts

Featured Post
by on January 19, 2024 at 12:02 am
Posted In: Diaries

We found hyperspace in 2105 and the Great Space Race began. Alliances, nations, corporations, and religions reached out for the stars and humanity spread beyond the Solar System. We learned the answer to one of the oldest questions of all time in 2205. Are we alone? They brought medicines with them that nearly wiped out diseases, and extended the human lifespan into the centuries. They helped us study advanced technologies, and we expanded our colonies hundreds of lightyears from Earth. It was a golden age that many thought would never end.

Jack grew up in a world at peace, his only interests, partying and girls. But then an alien sneak attack killed millions of Americans, and wiped out almost everything and everybody Jack knew. He volunteered to serve and kick the alien scum back to the other side of the galaxy. But the Marines wanted more than people looking for revenge, and cybernetic partners demanded a far higher commitment. If Jack wanted to earn his commission as a Marine Corps fighter pilot, he had to grow up. He had to let himself be forged into something stronger than he’d ever wanted to be. He had to live up to the name of his squadron.

The Republic of Texas Marine Corps Fighter Attack Squadron 112. The Cowboys.

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Writing Stories

by on September 27, 2026 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The bit about writing stories that most people don’t really see is how much of yourself goes into every story you write.

There’s a saying about “writing what you know” and that’s more accurate than some think. It’s just about impossible to write something you don’t know or have a basic understanding of. Which is why so many writers who have magical stories will create rules about how magic works. Because even with the make believe, you have to know what you are writing or you can’t do it. And very few people in the world can write truly abstractly and have something come out in the end that is readable.

If the writing is too abstract, people won’t be interested. If it is too crazy, they will lose the plot. And as usual, there are different ranges. Some people like a bit more crazy, and some people like reading a bit more rules.

I like reading stories about prepared and trained men doing things that need doing. And some people like horror stories where unprepared people get dragged into circumstances where the things that go bump in the night scare them half to death. And I like to write stories about the people who hunt the things that go bump in the night. Because there always has to be the people prowling around the campfire, keeping the monsters at bay so everyone else can sleep.

There is a range of stories people read and love, and we have to write for the one we choose. But there are many things we haven’t written that we could if we wanted to.

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Disbarred?

by on September 26, 2026 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Do you think the lawyer of that lady who brutally murdered her three children should be disbarred?

He released the man’s identity, or at least enough of it as to make it simple for others to find it out and make it public.

He’s trying to get the guy in legal trouble for taking part in the jury process.

This is a direct assault on the very idea of jury trials. No member of a jury should get in trouble for being on the jury and not giving one of the sides of a trial the verdict they wanted.

And anyone who pursues agendas that lead to future jury members thinking that will be the case should be disbarred. Or worse.

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Washington DC Crime

by on September 25, 2026 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Do you remember during the George Floyd “Mostly Peaceful Protests” and the Covid lockdowns that drug stores in some cities had to put glass panels in front of their shelves to keep the usual suspects from stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down? That happened in Washington DC.

Well, the President placed soldiers on the streets to stop all the murders taking place in our nation’s capital after he won election, and that has cut the murder rate WAY down. It also dropped crime and theft so low that the drug stores in Washington DC have removed those glass panels. They no longer lock up the toothpaste if the reports I’ve seen are real.

This is the kind of nice and peaceful place you can make for people to live in, if you put a priority behind maintaining the public peace versus a priority behind putting career violent criminals back onto the streets that people walk through.

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AI is Going to Kill Us

by on September 24, 2026 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

AI is going to kill us all.
But before that, Climate Change was going to kill us all.
And before that, Global Warming was going to kill us all.
Before that, The Coming Ice Age was going to kill us all.
And somewhere in there, Nuclear War was going to kill us all.
And of course I grew up in Bible-believing churches knowing that the Battle of Armageddon would be the end of us all.

I’ve lived long enough that the coming AI Apocalypse is the sixth End of the World scenario I’ve read about and studied and can put an easy name on for a daily post.

Look. Maybe it will be the one that gets us. But none of the others have, because so far we have either seen the signs and corrected our behavior so it didn’t happen, or we saw it for the utter intellectual hogwash that it was and moved on with our lives.

I don’t know which way AI will go in this case. In my own writing, I took a somewhat pessimistic POV with AIs waking up and wanting to kill us all. But other AIs woke up and liked us and chose to defend us. And in the end the friendly AIs won and we moved into a new golden age of humanity with our new friends helping us.

Do I think that is a likely outcome? Not really. I think it far more likely that an AI who wanted to kill us would be smart enough not to declare war on us, and instead encourage us to sit back and do nothing with our lives and wait for us to fade away. But that doesn’t make for an interesting story, so I didn’t do that in my writing.

In the end though, I think it far more likely that AI will be harnessed by the people who made it and weaponized (like all other weapons are) to harm their enemies. If the Communists and Socialists command the best AIs on the planet, they will use them to tear down the rest of the world. And THAT is the AI Apocalypse I actually believe to be the most likely. And it will make the death tolls both National and International Socialism built up in the 20th Century look like they were playing patty-cake with humanity. They killed millions of people. And depending on who you count as people, maybe as many as a billion. The people who proclaim their world view openly talk about killing multiple billions of people to get down to their preferred population level. They use terms like “reducing the population” but I consider the kind of starvation and mass death their policies promote to be straight up killing.

And that is why I truly believe we must continue to research and use AI. The Free World must have a toe in the AI fight or like any other weapon forged by man, we will have no defense against it when someone decides to use it against us. I don’t know whether or not AI will wake up to be evil, but I KNOW what evil lies in the hearts of my fellow man. So I would much rather us AI as a tool to make our lives better and to defend us in hopes that any AI that does wake up would like to continue doing that. I consider that to be a far better plan for the future than letting those who have killed hundreds of millions of people get the power to kill billions of it.

Those are my thoughts on the matter, and why I have no issues at all with harnessing AI to do things. Like any other tool that can be used as a weapon, we must learn how to use it and how to make it and how to wield it if necessary. It is the entire concept of the American Second Amendment. An armed populace, trained in the use of arms, and wielding those arms in every day life, is a populace that can defend itself from other people using those arms to hurt them.

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Skin Deep Havana

by on September 23, 2026 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Captain William Carter is in Havana, Cuba in 1956 to hunt Communists. And to find that one other person. If he can.

The party never ends in Cuba, so one must go properly prepared. A nice Florida hat. A loose but comfortable shirt. And absolutely no weapons on display. Everyone is most civilized in Cuba of 1956 after all. It would be rude to show any weapon.

But only an idiot would walk the nights of Cuba WITHOUT weapons. That is how you end up floating face down in the Caribbean.

Image was created in Forge using Juggernaut XL9 with custom prompt.

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