Goodreads Book Giveaway February 7 – 19 of “The Sniper”

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Huzzah!  The chance to win a free paperback copy of this desperately sought after literary jewel.  Did I say jewel?  Nay!  Miracle!!!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Sniper by Jake Barter

The Sniper

by Jake Barter

Giveaway ends February 19, 2026.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye

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We interrupt the daily progression of actual civil war to bring you a message about a fictional civil war story.  I’ve finished the manuscript for my book, “The Sniper.”  Now I’m looking for beta readers.  I’m looking for folks to read the book and give me their honest feedback.  Also I’d like to disseminate the book to friends and family who you judge would be a good fit for the book based on your estimation and if they agree to read it I’d like to get their opinions too.

I’m looking to get this book out to the largest group of people possible to see whether it is something that people will want to read.  So after reading it if you think it’s appropriate for people you know let me hear that too.  And remember, I’m not a fragile author.  If you think it sucks, say so, but also tell me why you think it.

If you’re interested leave a comment to that effect and I’ll e-mail you a copy of the story.  Now this is just a pdf.  No nice cover, no actual paper.  Just electrons.  But I will guarantee that this sniper is nothing like the actual sniper we’ve had to hear about for the last week.

And just to remind you here’s the beginning of the book.

 

Chapter 1 – An Object Lesson

Joseph Boghadair was set up at a loophole in a small prefabricated metal building at the top of the mountain that contained the Icarus Mine.  His .50 caliber sniper rifle was trained on the narrow road that led up to the mine.  He could see a line of black SUVs about a mile and a half down the road and he was getting ready to start firing on the convoy.  His first shots took out the engine of the lead vehicle thereby halting the convoy.  His second volley took out the engine of the last car in line thus trapping the rest of the vehicles between.  Then at a more leisurely pace he took care of the other eight vehicles.  By this point the passengers were crouching behind their disabled cars and randomly firing handguns and automatic weapons in Joseph’s general direction with almost no discernible results.

After about half an hour a few of the men in black body armor attempted to reach a stand of trees about 300 yards away to their left.  Joseph put a few well aimed rounds in front of their path and they quickly retreated back to the supposed safety of their not-so-mobile-autos.  Joseph snorted wryly at their shyness.

An hour after that a helicopter approached the mountain from the opposite direction to Joseph’s loophole.  Walking over to a window on the other wall he could see a distant Blackhawk approaching at relatively high altitude.  Joseph then began his preparations for their reception.

Between crew and troops, the Blackhawk had a dozen men on board.  And more importantly it had a couple of Hellfire missiles.  From a very safe distance away it targeted Joseph’s position and fired.  The missile struck precisely on target and obliterated the steel structure almost completely.  All that remained was the foundation of the structure around the mine shaft, now clogged with debris.

The Blackhawk landed about three quarters of a mile from the mine entrance.  At this point the agents, hunkered down behind their vehicles, began to stream toward the helicopter.  By the time they reached the aircraft the troops had exited and were waiting for their rescued brethren to arrive.

FBI Special Agent in Charge, George Chastain assembled both teams and briefed them on the updated mission plan.  “We will proceed to the mine head and look for any human remains.  We will collect whatever we can retrieve for lab analysis and attempt to seal the mine head until qualified personnel can be assembled for recovery operations.  It is presumed that the target, Joseph Boghadair was killed by the missile strike but we will take no chances.  He was an extremely dangerous individual and should not be approached by anyone without backup and prior approval from leadership.  In addition to his war record it is believed that Boghadair is responsible for the shooting deaths of forty-six people in the last six months with thirteen of those people being FBI personnel.  No one enters the mine until remote sensing equipment is brought in.  Alright, proceed.”

The agents formed two groups.  Apparently, SUV agents and helicopter agents must not bond very well.  But before they were more than a hundred feet from the helicopter the ground began to quake so powerfully beneath them that they were irresistibly knocked off their feet.  And while they were clawing at the ground for dear life, they could see that the high ground where the mine head was located had collapsed into the earth.  The roar of that collapse was more frightening than the initial earthquake and some of the agents hid their heads under their arms in abject terror.  When the mountain stopped shaking the men started to collect themselves and stand up.  When they looked around them, they were astonished.  A circular pit had opened up centered on the mine head.  It was a thousand yards in diameter and so deep that only blackness could be seen at its center.  Several cracks had formed outside the circular pit.  One of these had nearly swallowed the Blackhawk.  It was on its side and half buried in the crevice.  Its rotors were fractured and it wouldn’t be flying away from this landing.

Chastain went over to the edge of the crater and just stared down into the blackness below.  Then he went back to his team and started giving orders to begin a retreat from the stricken mountain.  He was trying to think of what he was going to tell his boss.  Nothing reasonable came to mind.

Snow and Sales and the Death of Cities

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A very interesting day.  We got about a foot of snow and the wind has been pretty wild so I decided to wait until Tuesday to move the white stuff.  Wednesday I’ve got to bring Camera Girl’s car to a new mechanic and then go to work so it’ll be a quiet day on the site.  The price reduction on the e-book of “The Sniper” is starting to have an effect.  I reached 500 on the techno-thriller list and got below 100,000 on the Amazon overall book sales list.  I know it’s not something to write home about but it was a big jump.

Hans G. Schantz, a science fiction author I correspond with kindly reposted my announcement on X about the e-book price drop on his X feed.  And since he has orders of magnitude more readers that I do I got hundreds of people looking in and one fellow not only reposted but also bought a copy of the book.  So that was fun.

I was looking around on YouTube and my feed included a video from someone called Sophia Miller entitled “Mayor Mamdani ERUPTS After BlackRock OFFICIALLY Exits New York For Good!”  Well, I watched that video and then I watched one about Chicago and then one about Illinois and two about California.

And you know, it occurred to me that the blue states are getting ready to either implode financially or confiscate the value of the homes of their citizens to pay off the public sector pension plans they’ve underfunded.

That’s a remarkable situation.  The blue states have driven away all of the corporations that used to pay the taxes that allowed them to buy the votes of municipal and state employees who now are ready to retire on gold-plated pension plans.  Things are about to get very, very ugly.  Chicago doubled the property taxes on some working-class Chicagoans.  Mamdani is talking about raiding the New York City workers pension plans and raising property taxes by 10%.  But along with that increase will come extremely frightening revaluations of homes.  Couple this with the flight out of the city of many of the Wall Street banks and financial companies like Black Rock and JP Morgan and what is coming up is a New York City budget gap in the billions of dollars.  And that will begin the death spiral for New York as the financial capitol of the world.  Without Wall Street, New York is a basket case with eight million people living in a crime ridden environment that suffers from expensive, crumbling infrastructure that it can no longer afford to maintain.

Well, maybe that’s why Mamdani is mayor.  Maybe they needed a stooge to absorb the punishment.  This will be an awful crash for the people living there and horrible for the people who didn’t vote for this idiot.  But it has to be done.  My only worry is that Trump will try to step in and save the idiots from themselves.  This needs to be allowed to play out to the final iteration.  Because the sinking of New York City will also sink New York State, Kathy Hochul needs to be destroyed in this disaster too.  All of them deserve it and their downfall will provide a powerful lesson for idiots all across the country.  Stupid kills.

 

 

 

 

 

O Canada!

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Alberta is taking a page from Quebec’s separatist campaign and the way things look there will be a referendum in October.  The exact wording of the referendum question will be “”Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?”  This wording was selected because it adheres to the phrasing in Canada’s federal Clarity Act.

Will the referendum succeed?  The polls I’ve seen say no.  Only about a third of voters want independence.  But then again, I remember how many polls said Hillary and Kamala were way ahead of Trump in their presidential races.  So, we’ll have to see.

But even if it fails this time I can see how a day will come when one or more of the western Canadian provinces will secede.  I was watching a video from a fellow in British Columbia who was of the opinion that if Alberta secedes, BC would not only secede but it would fragment into three separate parts.  I don’t pretend to know the details of provincial politics in Canada but I’ve heard that if Alberta leaves Saskatchewan and Manitoba are also very likely to follow suit.

Whether any seceding Canadian provinces decide to apply for American statehood is an interesting question.  I think there’s a good chance that they won’t.  They might feel their best option is combining with each other to form an alternative to Canada.  And that raises another question.  Without the western provinces would Quebec want to remain with rump Canada?  After all, Quebec decided not to secede because they know they receive much more from the federal government than they pay.  But that might no longer be the case when all that is left is Eastern Canada and the Arctic.  So pretty soon Canada becomes essentially Ontario and the Maritime provinces with the Yukon and Hudson Bay thrown in for ice fishing.  Now that is a different reality from the current situation.  But I think it’s a definite possibility in the next decade or so.

And why do I think all of this is important?  Because Canada is an extension of the same cultural and political environment that the United States inhabits.  Because of Quebec, Canada had to provide self-determination to their provinces to show that they weren’t ruling an empire.  Well, now it’s going to bite them on the butt.  And when Canada implodes, it is going to provide a spectacle for the Americans south of their border.

It’s funny how the Left always points at Canada as the template they approve of.  Well, maybe they would go along with adding a constitutional amendment allowing for secession referenda.  After all, if Canada does it, then it must be progressive and therefore good!  Well, anyway, it’s a thought.

The world is changing.  The globalist agenda has shaken things up and it will continue to change for the foreseeable future.  Where it ends up is anyone’s guess.  But I think it’s as likely to get better as it is to get worse.  So, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and see where the opportunities open up.  O Canada!

Donnie Darko (2001) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Continuing my review of a list of “best Science fiction movies” from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard spoken of as a “forgotten gem;” Donnie Darko.  I will attempt to disavow my audience of that idea.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

I would compare this movie to some mash-up of “The Breakfast Club” with a cheapo time travel/horror movie.  The movie is stewed in teenage angst in an upscale California town where Donnie Darko (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal) is undergoing psychotherapy to find out why he is hallucinating about a man in a dog mask who seems to be telling him to do dangerous and harmful things like smashing a water main to flood out his high school and burn down the house of a motivational speaker who is appearing at the school’s Health classes.

While staying out all night at the urging of Frank (the dog guy) Donnie escapes death when an airliner engine falls out of the sky and destroys his bedroom.  It turns out that the FAA can’t locate a plane that lost an engine that day.  Meanwhile his science teacher answers questions about time travel by using Stephen Hawking’s theories about wormholes to justify Donnie’s belief that his psychosis is really messages being sent to him from time travelers.  And when he finds out that an old woman who lives up in the hills was a teacher at his school who wrote a book about time-travel he becomes convinced that he will be involved in a time travel event.

It all comes to a head around Halloween so the fact that some of the kids in the movie are wearing masks becomes less inexplicable but no less annoying.  By the end of the movie several people have been killed violently which appears to include his mother and younger sister who are aboard a jet airliner that coincidently has lost an engine over his town before landing.

At that point, Donnie goes up to the mountains to await the time-traveling storm that’s about to strike.  The end of the movie returns back a month before all the trouble started and this time Donnie is in the room when the engine strikes.  So apparently, he’s sacrificed himself to prevent the deaths of his mother and sister and his girlfriend and the guy who ran her over and was then shot to death by Donnie.  The end.

I hated this movie so much I can’t state it enough.  I despised everyone in it.  That includes Donnie, his English teacher (played by Drew Barrymore), his mother (played by the actress who was the president’s wife in Independence Day), the motivational speaker who turned out to be a kiddie porn purveyor (played by Patrick Swayze), and basically everyone else in the movie.  Everything about this movie was annoying or depressing.  And calling it science fiction is absurd.  There’s absolutely no justification given for any of the events or hallucinations that Donnie experienced.  But honestly, he was such an unlikeable character that all I felt at the end of the movie was annoyance that I had sat through this ridiculous movie.  I don’t recommend this movie to any fans of science fiction.

Cultural Pep Talk

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So, what’s the deal?  Are we reaching the end of the American Century and should we abandon all hope, we who enter?  Or is there any other way to approach the situation we are in?  Well, I would be accused of being a hopeless optimist if I didn’t admit that western civilization has fallen off a cliff at this point.  Looking around and seeing what passes for leadership and competency it’s impossible not to see a step change down from what existed a generation before.  Even the crooks are a couple of standard deviations below the level that used to operate in the last century.  Everything is diminished.  It’s undeniable.

Where do we go from here?

A few years ago, I read a book by a culture critic named Rod Dreher called “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.”  Now Dreher is a man of the right but he has had lots of fights with many other folks on his “side of the aisle.”  If I remember correctly, he’s not very fond of Donald Trump.  Oh, well.  But there was much in his book that I found interesting and helpful.  He talked about how our era had commonalities with 5th century A.D. Europe during the fall of the Roman Empire.  The Benedict in the title refers to Saint Benedict who at that time founded the Benedictine monastic order that began the slow painful process of restoring civilization to the human wreckage that existed after civil authority broke down after the barbarian hordes knocked over the Roman government.  Dreher’s point was that we no longer live in a society united under a common culture or religion.  But that doesn’t prevent us from forming our own communities to preserve the things we value and pass them on to our descendants.

And he’s absolutely correct.  Now admittedly, the left is doing everything it can to infect all areas of civil life with their Anti-American, Anti-European, Anti-Christian, Anti-western-civilization, anti-white propaganda and agenda.  But giving up because it’s difficult is the very definition of weakness.  If the things we want to see endure are worth saving then they are certainly worth fighting for.

So, I see this as the alternative to despair.  Look at the current state of affairs as a test of fitness for people and ideas.  If you’re not willing to fight for the things you value then maybe you don’t actually value them that much at all.  It certainly is a shame that the elites in this country valued the monetary advantages they could gain from globalism over the patriotic loyalty they owed to their fellow citizens and drowned our culture in third world “diversity.”  But just giving up is weak and defeatist and now that the globalists have been exposed it’s incumbent on us to support all individuals and organizations that work toward preserving the best parts of our traditional culture and do everything we can to reconstitute that culture and allow it to flourish again in this country.  Start rebuilding.