Blurb / Intro to WIP #1. ------- Good Science Fiction asks, “What if?” Good Fantasy asks, “Why not?” This story says, “Take my hand…” Man on the edge. World on the cusp. Can love survive? In the time before, when the Night cared little and her priesthood cared less, her priests were taken from us by a plague the Night would not cure. For generations the faithful cried for a leader the Night would not provide. Leaders the Church did not give. Leaders whose wars showed they were not true. Leaders whose eyes beheld only power and control. Except for those who did not wish to lead.  Lovers who saved the world. This is their story.  Their Purrspectives.

Earlier this year in February, the @AmericanLegion stood with the veteran community by opposing the VA's "Impact of Medication" interim final rule. By mobilizing a massive membership response, you flooded Regulations.gov under Docket No. VA-2026-VBA-0067 with over 19,000 comments in just days, forcing the VA to rescind the final rule. Now, we urgently need that exact same leadership. Congress is attempting an identical bypass by embedding the frozen 2022 rating cuts directly into the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act (H.R. 9237 / S. 4744) to extract a $57B budget offset. This maneuver directly strips away earned disability compensation from veterans suffering from tinnitus and sleep apnea, while simultaneously choking off the VA's long-term ability to expand mental health benefits for an estimated 1.8 million struggling veterans. The Legion has a proud history of protecting earned benefits. Can the Legion issue an urgent Action Alert just like the @DAVHQ and @VFWHQ to stop these devastating offsets and protect the future of veteran health care? There are only 5 signatures remaining to force a clean vote on the Major Richard Star Act via the H.Res. 1247 discharge petition. Let's get across the finish line.

DAY 14 — NATIONAL GUN VIOLENCE AWARENESS MONTH TWO BUILDINGS. SAME SHOOTER. ONE DIFFERENCE. December 9, 2007. Arvada, Colorado. A Sunday morning. The Youth With A Mission center is a training and dormitory facility for young Christian missionaries. It is the kind of place you would not think twice about — a quiet building full of people who chose a life of service, who got up early on a Sunday to be there, who were not thinking about what Matthew Murray had been thinking about for a very long time. Murray is 24. He applied to YWAM's missionary training program and was rejected. He has been carrying that rejection — and a great deal of other things — for months. He goes to the YWAM center. He opens fire. Tiffany Johnson, 26, is killed. Philip Cruse, 26, is killed. Two others are wounded. No one is armed. There is nothing to stop him. He leaves. He drives south on I-25, about 65 miles, to Colorado Springs. New Life Church is a congregation of approximately 7,000 members. It is a Sunday. Services are ongoing. People are inside. The parking lot is full. Murray arrives with multiple firearms and approximately 1,000 rounds of ammunition. In the parking lot, he shoots Stephanie Works, 18 years old, and her sister Rachel Works, 16 years old. Both are killed. Then he goes inside. What he does not know — what he cannot know — is that New Life Church has an armed volunteer security team. And on the security team is a woman named Jeanne Assam, a former Minneapolis police officer who carries a concealed firearm with a valid Colorado permit and has the full knowledge and authorization of the church's pastor to be armed on that property. She hears the shots in the parking lot. She finds Murray in a hallway. She identifies herself. He fires at her. She fires back — multiple rounds, controlled, deliberate, the kind of shooting that comes from training and from deciding in advance what you are going to do when the moment arrives. Murray goes down. He fires a final round into himself. The attack is over. Pastor Brady Boyd stood in front of his congregation afterward and said what the national news was not particularly interested in repeating: "I believe she saved over 100 lives." Seven thousand people were in that building. One woman with a concealed carry permit and a church policy that allowed her to be armed stood between Matthew Murray and every single one of them. THE ONE VARIABLE I want you to hold both locations in your mind at the same time, because this is the entire gun control debate resolved by a single Sunday morning. Same shooter. Same weapons. Same intent. Same ammunition load. Same level of law enforcement response. Same everything — except for one variable. YWAM had no armed defender. New Life Church did. At YWAM: two killed, two wounded, attack ended only when Murray chose to leave. At New Life Church: two killed in the parking lot before Assam knew what was happening, then the attack inside — where there were seven thousand potential victims — was ended by one armed civilian volunteer before he could reach them. The variable was not the gun. Murray had guns at both locations. The variable was the POLICY. YWAM's policy left its people defenseless. New Life Church's pastor had made a specific, intentional decision to allow armed security — not law enforcement, not a private contractor, a church volunteer with a permit — and that decision is the reason the death count from New Life Church is two instead of something the awareness campaign would have been talking about for years. No ribbon. No press conference. No legislation. A policy decision by a pastor. This is what the gun control conversation costs when it goes in the wrong direction — not just abstract statistics, but the specific difference between two and an unknowable number on the same morning, measured by whether one person was allowed to be armed. What next — someone is going to propose that a "No Firearms Allowed" sign deters someone who just killed two people at one location and drove to the next... wait. That was Murray's first stop. That was the YWAM center. The sign did not deter him. He left two people dead and got on the highway. THE "GUN SHOW LOOPHOLE" THAT DOES NOT EXIST THE WAY THEY DESCRIBE IT Since we are in National Gun Violence Awareness Month and Congress reliably uses June to push for closing the so-called "gun show loophole," let me tell you what Dr. John Lott found when he actually ran the numbers. First, the factual foundation: a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of 18,000 prison inmates found that fewer than ONE PERCENT of criminals who possessed a gun obtained it at a gun show. Adding flea markets gets the number to 1.7 percent. Meanwhile, 40 percent of crime guns came from friends or family, and 39 percent from the street or illegal sources. You are proposing to regulate 1.7 percent of the problem while leaving 79 percent completely untouched. If a student submitted that as a policy solution in my classroom, I would hand it back. But here is what Lott found when states actually closed the "loophole" — when they mandated background checks on private handgun transfers: Murder rates went UP two percent. Robbery rates went UP three percent. Table 10.12 in More Guns, Less Crime. Direct from the data. Closing the gun show loophole did not reduce murder. It raised it. Presumably because the regulation made it harder for law-abiding citizens to obtain firearms through private transfers — the 98.3 percent of legal gun transactions that were never part of the crime problem — while doing nothing to the 79 percent of criminals getting guns from the street and from people they know. And waiting periods. Since we are already here: Lott's analysis of state and county data found no statistically significant relationship between waiting period laws — or the LENGTH of those waiting periods — and violent crime rates. None. The direction of the effects was inconsistent. The magnitude was insignificant. You are making a law-abiding widow wait three to five days to buy a firearm after she reports a stalker, and the data says it has not produced a meaningful reduction in violence. Not one category. Not one state. The policies on the June awareness agenda are not calibrated to the data. They are calibrated to an audience. Quinn's Law Number One: liberalism always produces the exact opposite of its stated intent. Close the gun show loophole — murder goes up. Mandate waiting periods — no effect on crime, one very real effect on the person who needed the firearm before the waiting period ended. Ban the policies that work; mandate the policies that fail. Repeat in June. Quinn's Law Number Six: facts are the enemy of liberalism. Jeanne Assam stopped a mass casualty event at a 7,000-person church in December 2007, and the pastor of that church credited her with saving over 100 lives. You almost certainly did not know her name before today. THE LEGAL REALITY THAT HOLDS REGARDLESS DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989) and Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) say the same thing they have said every day of this series: the government has no constitutional obligation to protect you as an individual. Law enforcement was not inside the YWAM center when Murray opened fire. They were not inside New Life Church when he walked in. They arrived. They did their jobs. The difference between the two outcomes on that Sunday was made by people who were already there — and whether those people were armed. The legal system acknowledges this reality in its most binding form: Supreme Court precedent. The policy being pushed every June acknowledges it too, in a different way — by working methodically to remove the one variable that made the difference. But what do I know — I am only a medically retired Army combat medic, a published textbook author, a science teacher at a high-need Career Tech district where I watch young people every single day learn to make decisions about what they will do when the moment arrives — and a father of four whose children understand that safety is a decision, not a campaign. Jeanne Assam made her decision. So did her pastor, when he wrote the policy that let her be there. IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE it so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE it — same shooter, same day, two locations, one variable. If this framing is new to you, it will be new to someone you know. COMMENT below: YWAM had no armed defender. New Life Church did. The outcome was different. Tell me why the June awareness campaign is not talking about that variable. And if you want MORE of this — the data, the history, the science, the stories — JOIN Bski's Classroom or follow me on YouTube. Subscribe to my account. About the cost of a cup of coffee per month. Your support keeps this classroom open, and I promise I will never run out of material as long as the left keeps trying to out-dumb itself. @JoJoFromJerz @GuntherEagleman @catturd2 #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

No apologies to Jeff Foxworthy You might autistic if; You hit your 10th anniversary grad party, can't remember any of your 100 classmates, & only have transactional acquaintances but no "friends" (outside of the military) with the few you DO remember. Next?

A new veterans bill includes Major Richard Star Act but cuts benefits for 1.5 million to fund it. Don’t be deceived by the title of this bill … it penalizes future combat veterans. The act is deceptively called the ‘Take Care of America’s Veterans Act’, and was introduced by House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jerry Moran. If the congressional PAYGO rules require a cost offset … TAKE THE MONEY/BENEFITS from what is being spent on Illegals, NOT our veterans today or in the future. @NRSC @dscc @SenateGOP @SenateDems @HouseVetAffairs I suggest that everyone read the article and draw your own conclusions … I have stated mine! Excerpts from Article: Congressional Republicans introduced a nearly 600-page veterans benefits package on June 10 that would end a longstanding pay offset for combat-injured veterans but would cut disability compensation for up to 1.5 million other veterans to cover the cost. The Poison Pill The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the Major Richard Star Act alone would cost $78 billion in direct federal spending over the 2026-2036 period. Under congressional PAYGO rules, that cost must be offset.

That offset comes from the effective elimination of VA disability compensation for tinnitus and sharply reduce compensation for veterans with obstructive sleep apnea who manage the condition with a CPAP device. The changes would apply to all new claims and to future reassessments of existing claims.

The Department of Veterans Affairs projects Section 108 would reduce disability compensation payments by up to $57 billion over 10 years and affect up to 1.5 million veterans.

A new veterans bill includes Major Richard Star Act but cuts benefits for 1.5 million to fund it wearethemighty.com/military-…

My current Retired Pay is $3,500 (What the Major Richard Star Act was intended to restore) My current CRSC amount is $1,512. Enter the New Scr*w Over America's Veterans Act" The Calculation from the website would get me to $2,333. My High 3 at 50% would get me to $1,650. And I MUST take the lesser of the two. So for an extra $138 bucks we are going to scr*w over all disabled veterans for the rest of time. And there are two more knives in Section 101 that no VSO is touching. The 50% cap on retirement (somebody explain why we are LOWERING the ceiling on what a wounded veteran is allowed to earn). And roughly 15,000 of the 54K written right out of the count by how Guard and Reserve get treated in this language, especially those who hold their 20-year letter but do not have 20 years of total service for disability retirement under 10 U.S.C. § 1208. Major Star fits that description too. The cherry on top. Subparagraph (C) is drafted disjunctively as well, page 8, lines 5 through 8, so a Reservist can satisfy BOTH buckets at the same time, with NO rule of priority anywhere in the text. DFAS gets to sort it out administratively. Translation: a decade of appeals. Here is the genuinely maddening part. This is not sabotage. It is ONE word. The disjunctive "or" sitting at page 7, lines 13 and 14. Fixable in an afternoon. IF the organizations with standing demand the fix BEFORE passage instead of litigating it for ten years afterward. So I will ask it plainly. Where are the VSOs on Section 101? I have heard plenty about tinnitus. I have watched the victory laps. I have not heard one syllable about the cuts.

Who hates Veterans this MUCH? President Trump, please do not sign this destructive bill that crushes veterans benefits for those who have served their nation selflessly! These selfish politicians hate veterans and do everything in their power to hurt them any way they can, they are unpatriotic traitors of our nation.

I agree!

‼️ Action Alert‼️ Congress is considering legislation that would expand some veterans' programs by changing disability ratings for tinnitus and obstructive sleep apnea. According to VA estimates, those changes could affect up to 1.5 million veterans and reduce disability compensation by approximately $57 billion over the next 10 years. Veterans should not pay for veterans' benefits. Take action today and tell Congress to Honor the Contract and protect earned disability compensation: votervoice.net/VFW/Campaigns… #HonorTheContract #VFW #Veterans #VeteranAdvocacy #ProtectVeteransBenefits

At this point, F both sides if they let the Major Richard Star Act die. .@SenBlumenthal, Republicans asked for an offset. Offer something reasonable and non-VA so wounded vets are not forced into a 50% cap or VA benefit cuts. Republicans, get in line with the VSOs. DAV, VFW, and WWP are warning against the Bost-Moran poison pills. There is no way Senate has the votes. Combat injured retirees should not have to choose between nothing and a watered down bill that makes veterans pay for veterans. No VA cuts. No 50% cap. Keep H.Res. 1247 alive. Pass the real Major Star Act. #majorstaract @VFWHQ @DAVHQ @MilitaryOfficer @AMVETSHQ

Historic Veterans Package Rolls 60 Bills Into One Military Congressional Push military.com/historic-vetera…. The “Take Care of America’s Veterans Act” is a betrayal wrapped in bipartisan packaging — and it should disgust every veteran who ever put on the uniform. substack.com/@pciminelli/not…

It amazes me that Republicans are all of a sudden worried about 1 billion dollars (cost of the Major Richard Star Act) and are trying to MAKE OTHER VETERANS pay for a slight increase to our EARNED MILITARY RETIREMENT when, and I quote, "Federal prosecutors estimate that more than half of roughly $18 billion spent since 2018 across 14 Minnesota-linked programs may have been fraudulent." So that's $8 Billion. Just in one state.

The “Take Care of America’s Veterans Act” is a betrayal wrapped in bipartisan packaging — and it should disgust every veteran who ever put on the uniform. substack.com/@pciminelli/not…

Best answer I’ve ever read to the question: What is the main theme in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?

Is it really a home if you have no kitchen and no way to cook? Not eating isn't an option in the long run. The hunger will grow too strong, so eventually one of you will step out to get stuffed. Only other option is you both whither away to a shell of the person you once were.

You know what a burn pit smells like. If you were there -- if you served in Iraq or Afghanistan -- you already know. That thick, chemical, wrong smell that never fully left the back of your throat. Plastics. Chemicals. Medical waste. Ordnance. Burning. All day. Every day. Right next to where you slept, where you ate, where you ran PT in the morning. Nobody told you what it would do to your lungs. His name was Richard Star. Army combat engineer from Ohio -- right near Cleveland. He cleared IED-laden roads so other soldiers could drive on them without dying. Desert Shield. Desert Storm. Iraq. Afghanistan. Kuwait. He went back. He kept raising his hand. He breathed those burn pits for years -- the same smoke, the same chemical air, the same carcinogens that had no business being in a human lung. In 2018, that smoke caught up with him. Stage 4 metastatic lung cancer. The VA rated it 100% service-connected. His own government certified in writing that the United States of America's burn pits gave Richard Star terminal cancer. He was medically retired before hitting 20 years. Not because he quit. Because there was nothing left to give. And then the Army sent him a letter. The letter showed two numbers. The first number was what Richard Star had EARNED in military retirement -- what the United States government had promised him when he raised his right hand and swore an oath and then spent decades keeping it. The second number -- what he would ACTUALLY receive -- was zero. Zero dollars. Zero cents. His 100% VA disability rating for the cancer eating his lungs wiped out his entire retirement check through the concurrent receipt offset. Dollar for dollar. Every single penny of retirement pay he had earned, gone. A man dying of cancer he got in uniform, holding a piece of paper from his own government that said his retirement was worth nothing. If you have buried someone from burn pit exposure, I need you to sit with that image. Your brother. Your battle buddy. Your soldier. Sitting at a kitchen table. Oxygen tank next to the chair. Chemo running through his veins. Holding a government letter that says zero. That is what happened to Richard Star. His wife Tonya quit her career to become his full-time caregiver. While she sat next to him through every treatment, while their household ran on whatever the VA disability check provided, while the retirement check the Army told him he'd earned sat at zero -- Tonya was also fighting. Calling. Writing. Testifying. Standing in congressional hearing rooms telling her husband's story to the people who had the power to fix it. Richard never stopped either. He traveled on oxygen tanks to advocate for this bill. He could barely stand. He fought for the 50,000 veterans behind him who were carrying the same injustice, because that is what that kind of man does -- he thinks about the ones behind him even when he is the one dying. He died February 13, 2021. He was 51 years old. Tonya kept going. She kept his name alive in every room she could reach, because she loved him and because she refused to let what happened to Richard happen to the next family. Tonya passed away on August 12, 2024. She was also 51 years old. Both of them gone at 51. Both of them fighting until they could not. The bill still not law. Right now -- today, this month, this year -- there are 50,000 veterans receiving that same letter Richard received. Two numbers. What they earned. What they actually get. And for too many of them, the second number is devastating. Some of them are already sick. Some of them already have the diagnosis. Some of them are sitting at kitchen tables with oxygen tanks next to the chair, opening mail from the government that sent them to those burn pits, wondering if this country is going to keep its promise before they run out of time. Sgt. Lyle Allen. 14 years. Multiple deployments to Iraq. His vehicle hit an IED. He does not remember much after that -- just the medics' faces above him. The VA certified his TBI as 100% permanently and totally disabling -- it will never improve. The offset wiped out his retirement. He calls himself "retired without retirement." He says the country is "turning their backs" on him. A Marine. 17 years. Three combat tours. An IED in Afghanistan took both of his legs. THREE YEARS from the 20-year mark. Three years. The government took his legs in the service of this nation and then took his retirement check on top of it because of a calendar. These are not abstractions. These are the men who were standing next to you downrange. The ones who smelled what you smelled. The ones who drove those roads. The bill to fix this is the MAJOR RICHARD STAR ACT. Current 119th Congress: H.R. 2102 in the House, sponsored by Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) with Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA), introduced March 14, 2025. S. 1032 in the Senate, sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) with bipartisan co-sponsors including Mike Crapo, Elizabeth Warren, and Rick Scott. Previous Congress: H.R. 1282 in the House and S. 344 in the Senate -- died without a floor vote. Current co-sponsors: 322 in the House. Nearly 80 in the Senate. The Wounded Warrior Project, MOAA, VFW, IAVA -- virtually every major veterans organization in this country -- stands behind this bill. The votes exist. The will to schedule them does not. On March 3, 2026, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin blocked this bill on the Senate floor. Twice. Once on unanimous consent. Then again when a compromise was offered for a simple recorded roll call. He did not want the bill to pass. He did not want to go on record opposing it either. His reason: cost. Richard Star got a letter that said zero. Senator Johnson found that affordable. I need you to make a phone call. Right now. While this is still in your chest where it belongs. SENATE SWITCHBOARD: (202) 224-3121. Tell them: "I am calling to demand my senator support S. 1032, the Major Richard Star Act, and force a floor vote. Combat-wounded veterans are dying while this sits in committee." HOUSE SWITCHBOARD: (202) 225-3121. Tell them: "I am calling to ask my representative to co-sponsor H.R. 2102 and demand leadership schedule a floor vote." Then share this post. Every share puts Richard Star's name in front of someone who has not heard it yet. Every share might reach a veteran who does not know they are owed this money right now. Every share might reach the family member who makes the call that changes the vote. Richard Star traveled on oxygen tanks to fight for veterans he would never meet. The least we can do is make a phone call. @MajorStarAct @StarActEnemies @SenRonJohnson @SenatorWicker IF you agree: LIKE this post so the algorithm shows it to the people who need to read it. SHARE this -- for Richard. For Tonya. For the veteran you know who is sick right now and does not know this fight exists. COMMENT below -- have you called yet? Tell me right here. Hold yourself accountable out loud. And if you want MORE of this -- the data, the history, the science, the stories -- JOIN Bski's Classroom community on X or YouTube. But what do I know -- I am only a medically retired Army combat medic who breathed that same air, who served alongside men who came home carrying things that would kill them slowly, and who has spent years watching a government that sends people to war find every possible excuse not to keep its promises when they come back broken. #MAGA #Veterans #Trump #majorstaract

Ask any Black person like me who has walked away from their village, family, community, or hometown to build a life on their own. They will tell you straight: The vast majority of us did not leave because of race. It has nothing to do with White people or any other race. We left because we could no longer survive the mentality around us - the one that constantly drags us backward, kills ambition, and punishes anyone trying to rise. Staying meant choosing failure by association. So we chose ourselves. It's like a death cult. Again, nothing to do with SKIN COLOR. Everything to do with ATTITUDE.

She needs to be investigated by the FBI and the DOJ. How many thi is has she sabotaged already?