Give Peace a Chance

by on October 14, 2025 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The last of the living hostages have been freed by Hamas and a ceasefire is breaking out in Gaza with a large swath of Middle East countries in on the plan. There are twenty points to it, including a requirement that Hamas disarm and shut down. Not everything is good. Israel has to release nearly 2,000 terrorists from prison as part of it. But every treaty is a compromise where some people have to give up things they don’t want to do in order for others to do things they want done. In the end, Trump got a large group of disparate nations on different sides of major religious and economic and cultural issues to come together and agree on a single treaty that has a chance of bringing an end to the fighting in Gaza. Will it succeed? I don’t know. But this is a step forward to give peace a chance. I very much hope it will work.

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Transformers

by on October 13, 2025 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I’ve been a fan of Transformers, the toys not the energy network converters, for pretty much my entire life. The TV show and the comics and the toys filled my childhood, even as I could barely afford them. We didn’t have cable most of my childhood, so I rarely got to see the cartoon, but I rented what videos I could from Blockbuster back in the day. And the toys were expensive, so I didn’t have many of them. But the comic I could buy for 75 cents a piece back in the day. I could afford that once a month, and the Transformers comic became one of my reading pleasures along with Star Trek and Star Wars novels. They were my window into a world where good fought evil and usually won. Or at least survived to fight another day.

You may not be surprised to learn that the first fan fiction I wrote was Star Trek and Star Wars related, and Transformers was in there as well. And what might surprise you is that the first story someone else ever published that I wrote was for a print magazine that published Transformers fan fiction. Now I spend most of my time writing my own fiction looking to get paid for it, but I have soft spot for that old Transformers story, and it was one I never finished. I’ve always wanted to go back and complete that story, but never had the opportunity.

Well, the opportunity has arrived. The guy who ran that old fan fiction magazine has resurfaced on the internet and started doing his old thing again. We are all twenty years older than we were back then, but I quickly volunteered to redo my old story for his magazine. Just because I’m a fan and I want to do it. At first I thought I would just do a polishing up job and resubmit. But then I read it and realized how just how rough it was. So I shelved that over twenty-year old version and rewrote from scratch. The first part has been published already. The second I’m working on now, with a deadline of two days now. I’m mostly done. I’ve written the beginning and end and am working on the big fight in the middle as we speak.

I’m taking my time and introducing things a piece at a time. The first part was basically setting the stage, and acted as a kind of refresher for people who haven’t read the comics in thirty years. Yes, it has been over thirty years since the original comic ended, and this story is a direct continuation of it. So I needed to do a lot of universe rebuilding in part one. Part two is where the action really starts, and we get to see Transformers doing Transforming things in the here and now. You’ll get to see it soon if finish on time. Which I had better do. I did promise it on the 15th after all, so I need to finish that fight scene and get it all polished up and nice for publication.

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The Veiled Guardians and Trickster

by on October 12, 2025 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The Veiled Guardians and Trickster are both one step closer to being published. We might be within a month of the anthologies they are in hitting the market if schedules hold. Edits have gone through, I’ve received proofs for one, and things appear to be moving forward on both.

Each story features Captain William Carter in his quest to protect the young United States of the 1800s from otherworldly creatures and threats to mankind. Not every Indian spirit is happy to see the expansion of that power, and it falls to men like him to change their minds or stop them. Not every otherworldly creature is a threat to mankind after all. The trick is figuring out which is which, and he has spent a lifetime learning everything he can about that trick.

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Children

by on October 11, 2025 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Hundreds of thousands of children have suffered the effects of war and forced migration over the last few years. In Ukraine, Israel, and America alone, children have been kidnapped, held hostage, and killed in numbers that are unfathomable. Whether taken by Russians, Hamas, or by Human Smugglers, the suffering of these children has been horrible.

One of the chief jobs of civilization is to protect our children so they can grow into functional adults that drive civilization on to a better future. We have done a better job of this in recent months. American law enforcement officers report having found tens of thousands of the children over the last few months that child services lost during the Biden Administration. Reuniting them with their families is something that we must do.

At the same time, this weekend we have very good news for Israeli and Ukrainian children. Melania Trump has been talking with Putin who recently agreed to return some Ukrainian children to their families. And Donald Trump got just about everybody in the Middle East to agree to a cease fire in Gaza that will result in all of the remaining hostages being returned to Israel.

I don’t know how much of this will actually work. Putin and Hamas are not trustworthy. Both have broken many agreements in the past and I’m certain will break others in the future. We may find out this week that nothing happens. But this is still a step in the right direction. And I hope it marks genuine progress.

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Not Enough

by on October 10, 2025 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

A recent poll asked Democrats if they thought the Democrat Party was fighting Trump enough or not and 77% said not enough. That’s three quarters of Democrats, if the poll is accurate, think the Democrats should fight him more than they are now. They arrested him. They took hundreds of millions of dollars from him. They tried to put him in prison. They shot him in the head. But that’s not enough.

From one point of view, I understand. I mean, he’s President now, so obviously they didn’t fight him enough to stop that. But where do you go from there? They demanded social media companies ban Republicans who said things they didn’t agree with. They demanded links to articles they disagreed with be deleted and people who shared them banned. They straight up censored political speech during elections. They sent Republicans to prison during the Biden administration. Pro Life protestors standing peacefully outside abortion clinics were sent to prison. Government employees shot and killed Republicans, sometimes in public, sometimes in their homes. Others were put in solitary confinement, and some were denied life-saving treatments while in government confinement.

Not one Democrat I know has told me that any of this was wrong. I have had Democrats tell me that they deserved it. That the Republicans banned from social media deserved it. That Trump deserved it. That the Republicans put in prison deserved it. That Republicans shot dead deserved it. Democrats I know have never said to me that this was wrong.

And when asked now, 77% of Democrats say that their leaders aren’t fighting back enough. If this is accurate, that means the next time Democrats get in charge, they will want do more than what they did during the Biden administration. Because even now, three quarters of Democrats say their party is not fighting Trump enough.

Consider what that means for the future. Because there will be a time when Democrats get power again. It might be 2026. 2028. 2030. 2032. Heck, there are special elections right now in 2025. There are elections across the country every November. And Democrats are running in them. Democrats that can read polls and know that three quarters of their voters think they are not fighting hard enough now.

What will they do next if what they’ve done so far is not enough?

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