All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
That’s right get your free pdf copy of “The Sniper.” All that’s needed is to provide your e-mail address and view my harrangue at the end of the book to leave a review on Amazon. What’s fairer than that? Don’t answer that! It’s a rhetorical question as part of my sales pitch. Let me know if there are any problems with the download. This is my first attempt to use BookFunnel.
Click Here for Link to Sniper Giveaway
Update:
To verify my ownership of “The Sniper” for the Royal Road folks, I am adding this note to show I also control Orion’s Cold Fire.
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.
Here’s a relatively even-handed article about the ongoing clean-up going on at “60 Minutes” by Bari Weiss.
Tick, Tick … Boom Bari Weiss blew up 60 Minutes. What if her version of the show is better?
It’s hilarious how the quotes by CBS veterans paint Weiss as some sort of MAGA puppet of the Trump administration when in reality she’s a New York Times veteran who’s also a liberal lesbian leftist. But she is at least trying to imitate impartiality in the newsroom and that’s better than nothing. Worth a read if you’re interested in how the dinosaur media is being dragged into the twenty first century kicking and screaming.
Regardless of how little or how much the Democrats gain in the midterm elections Donald Trump will not have a congress that can legislate what he wants done in the country going forward. So, what’s a great disrupter to do?
I think Donald should declare a state of emergency and fix some stuff. I think he should use this state of emergency to balance the budget. Unilaterally. Unashamedly. I guess it would be a revolutionary move. But it’s needed. The country has been bled dry by the titanic waste of the federal budget and waiting anymore time would be dangerous. Now it’s not possible to eliminate a seventy trillion-dollar debt overnight. It will take decades to do that. But it seems necessary to at least make a start. It’s shocking to think that the last balanced budget was under, of all people, Bill Clinton. Of course, the “War on Terror” put an end to that but for the last quarter century American politicians have pretended that printing money endlessly was their God-given right. Well, it’s not. And acting like it is has brought us to the brink of hyperinflation. So, calling it a state of emergency is, in my opinion, completely accurate.
Now, this would be a very large undertaking. Slicing the budget down to size without undermining the stability of the economy or causing undue pain to the taxpayers requires the wisdom of a Solomon. DOGE had the right idea about eliminating boondoggles, leftist set asides and waste but it was just the tip of the iceberg. There are over a hundred years of malfeasance and stupidity in that seventy trillion-dollar debt and it will be necessary to close down whole governmental departments and cancel thousands of projects that either we don’t need or we can’t afford. So, there will be many, many oxen gored during this effort.
Luckily, the most important asset for an operation of this nature is a very skilled salesman; someone who can sell the idea based on the belief that the ones benefitting from all this waste is anyone else than the long-suffering American taxpayer. There’s nothing a taxpayer likes more to hear than that all those “leeches” out there are about to be removed from the federal budget and forced to do honest work or starve. So, Trump can sell this based on the idea that trimming the waste will drive inflation down to a very tolerable minimum and eventually taxes can also begin to drop. Not immediately of course. The accountants have to figure out how long it takes to reduce seventy trillion dollars to zero.
Now I’ve been told that not having a debt is actually bad for the country and the world. Well, I kinda don’t believe it. Sure, government bonds and bills are a very attractive way to spread the costs of expensive programs and systems over the course of several years but making believe that a balanced budget is a bad thing doesn’t add up for me. It’s one thing to buy a dishwasher on time. It’s an entirely different thing to be in hock to loan sharks for amounts you can never pay back. Donald put the United States on a permanent diet. It’s an emergency.
Bluid is thicker than water.
Sir Walter Scott
One thing to remember is a historical perspective. In the 40’s and 50’s New England was Republican, somewhere in the late 50’s to early 60’s a swing happened. Part of it I think was due to a shift in economy; much of manufacturing got up and left mostly for the South. Also, colleges shifted from very conservative to very liberal as the 60’s and 70’s went on. The Universities are a source of much of our growth through the 60’s as tech started to replace manufacturing.
The general character of the Old Line New Englander was fiscally conservative and relatively socially liberal (old meaning). In the cities, a far more liberal (modern meaning) variant (with a hint of that puritanism blended in) runs strong. And the populations of the cities and their near suburbs overwhelm the votes in the more old line/townie parts of the states.
Can we dig out of this? I’m not sanguine about that. MA, CT and RI and so overwhelmingly super liberal democrat in their legislatures that no reason reigns. On top of that RI and MA (and likely CT but I am less connected to that anymore) are rife with corrupt deals which feed back into the various Democrat politicians. VT and ME are overrun with hippy types that moved in and keep folks like Bernie and the other VT “Independent” senator in office. NH gets whipsawed back and forth as the balance swings, it is the most purple of the New England states, but it has voting laws (same day registration in particular) that let havoc happen at the towns containing UNH and Dartmouth. Maine is oddly split: the interior North is clearly Old Line New England and is actually one of its remaining bastions. But the coast (Portland and south) is VERY much indistinguishable from Boston suburbs in political bent. Just taking statewide offices from time to time is NOT sufficient. The state houses MUST be changed as that is where the power really lies. Without that, the feedback loop of Graft-> seats-> graft (repeat) can not easily be broken. If I had a guess, NH has the best chance to break the cycle. Its oddly large house means power doesn’t focus quite like it does in the other 5 states, so graft is less profitable. That combined with volatility in the seats weakens the loop. Unfortunately, when NH succeeds in starting to break away, it gets an influx of MA, VT, and ME folks who want the advantages but don’t buy into the politics, and we see that familiar seesaw effect as NH swings back to the Blue. I fear things will have to get MUCH worse for the head in their lower colon liberals to actually pop out and view the real world. Boston is Bad, but Not yet Detroit. Chicago or San Francisco bad, although Mayor Wu is trying REAL hard.
Being a Republican in New England is an awful fate. Well, no, a Republican in New England is typically just a Democrat who doesn’t like high taxes. He doesn’t have a problem with the social justice or the anti-white racism, just the loss of savings. But for someone like me who is genuinely conservative, it’s horrific. In every law and policy, you see misery and stupidity and what seems like the absolute worst governance imaginable.
Now, some of my fellow New England conservatives (of various stripes) are always hoping against hope that their neighbors will come to their senses and vote in a Mitt Romney or some other squishy “conservative” and fix the taxes, stop wasting money on welfare and get crime under control. They say things like, “If we can just boost turnout of Republicans and Independents, we can fix these problems and show the Democrat voters that we’re the sensible choice for fair governance.
But these are just pipe dreams. Sure, if the state after a decade or two of Democrat control has managed to empty the treasury and destroyed the credit rating of their specific New England state government, then surely, they will elect a Republican governor to restore fiscal sanity and prevent complete exsanguination. But if the Republicans could read even the smallest lesson from history, they would see that this is just an emergency tactic. Sort of like a rupture disk that prevents a catastrophic failure but is never meant to permanently regulate the system. As soon as the emergency is over the powers that be will set to work pushing the system to the breaking point again.
Now, my opinion about these things doesn’t make me a very popular figure around Republican party circles. What they want to hear is that things can be fixed and we’ll all live happily ever after. Which reads like a fairy tale to me. But the thing that gives me any hope at all is actually Michigan. There is a blue state that seems to be slowly slipping back into purple and maybe red status before our eyes. And maybe this is an evolution that worked its way through the death of one of the greatest American cities; Detroit. Detroit and by extension Michigan was a union heavy population. All the heavy industry, especially the auto industry played into the blue state model. But over the course of decades these industries have been victimized by the rust belt decline in middle America and with Detroit’s shrinking population we seem to have reached the point where Republicans (at least MAGA Republicans) have a chance to get elected even to the US Senate.
And maybe that’s the only way blue states can be flipped. They have to rot away to such an extent that the progressives leave out of desperation and all that remains are poor people who can’t escape. Something equivalent may be happening in California. But I think it will be decades before New England will reach anything like what California is experiencing. More promising in the Northeast is New York City and State. Here we see a case so extreme that even short-term changes may be enough to catastrophically destabilize the whole system.
But here in New England we’ll muddle along with just regular old progressive absurdity. We’ll leave true insanity to the experts in Gotham and Los Angeles.
There is a southern proverb—fine words butter no parsnips.
Sir Walter Scott
I went with my three youngest grandsons to see the new Spiderman movie; “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” And shockingly, I actually enjoyed it. We got there early enough to pick out good seats and let the kids buy mass quantities of popcorn and sugary drinks. So reinforced by these provisions we took our seats and watched the half hour of advertisements and coming attractions for all kinds of useless products and awful movies. Now it’s been a few years since we went to this theater and in the meantime, it went out of business and been refurbished by its new owners. And they installed luxury pleather powered recliners instead of the usual crappy movie seats of yesteryear. So far, so good!
So, I missed the previous Spiderman installment but I was told that in it another MCU character (Doctor Strange) performed some kind of magic-adjacent activity which eliminated knowledge of Peter Parker’s existence completely from the human race including all his friends and the girl (MJ) that he loves. Now this seems particularly stupid but that is the situation. So, one of the plots of this movie is Parker getting up the courage to tell MJ that she has forgotten that they were once in love. Okay, that’s an even stupider plot element but let’s give the writers some slack to try and make that work. Then there’s a plot element where Peter is having major problems with his spider powers. His ability to shoot webs and other skills seems to come and go. Okay, this is more of a standard superhero plot element so full speed ahead.
And finally, some telepath is able to take control of human minds and force them to attack a shadowy government agency called the Department of Damage Control (DODC) for some unknown reason. I won’t give away any spoilers by saying that DODC isn’t a benign organization and the telepath controlling minds isn’t completely unjustified in these actions.
Well, before the end we have a whole sequence where Bruce Banner is telepathically controlled and forced to turn into the Hulk with predictable cataclysmic results and we find out that Spiderman has a quasi-working relationship with the comic book character “The Punisher” an Italian American New Yorker whose real name is Frank Castle. Castle is a vigilante who doesn’t have as many scruples as Spiderman when it comes to using firearms to thwart criminals. As an Italian American native New Yorker myself, I especially relished Castle’s extremely accurate Bensonhurst accent and vocabulary. It felt like coming home.
Well, anyway, the plot moves along in a reasonably superhero-ish manner and naturally our hero comes out the other side with some progress in his personal problems but no permanent solutions so he can be just as conflicted in the next Spiderman movie sometime in 2028. And that is all that can ever be said for a Spiderman movie. Also, the special effects were especially deft and fun to watch. So, the movie was quite entertaining and the boys enjoyed it thoroughly. Or maybe it was the snacks.
Anyway, mission accomplished. We returned home and Camera Girl loaded down a table with spaghetti and meatballs along with some biscuits that these grandsons especially love to dunk in a meat sauce. What more could I ask for?
