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It’s Even Chilly By MY Standards!

Dang, y’all. It’s all the way up to 12°F around here. We were enjoying some single-digit action, but this is still wicked chilly, even by my standards. Oh well, I’ll still take it over summer heat and happily so.

The Burdensome Noise Of Silence

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King is quite quotable and a lot of what he said is even more poignant today than in his own time.

We’ve got a tyranny of idiots holding sway over our country at this point. Despite holding Congress by the slimmest of margins, they believe they have a mandate and have been ramming all of their crappy ideas down our throats with horrendous gusto.

Predictably, those that they have successfully enacted immediately proceed to suck. Those in which they have been thwarted continue to suck in theory. With the willing accomplices of the legacy media and Big Tech, they’re doing their level worst to “fundamentally transform” our country.

It’s almost as if Barack Obama got a third term. Considering Creepy Uncle Joe can’t quite figure out whether he’s even the President, it could very well be.

Just the same, the more perfidy and infamy they engage in, the worse it will be for them in the midterms.

The only problem is, even if the Demonrats lose their Congressional majority (slim though it is) in November, there are so many trash RINOs out there who cave to the Leftard zeitgeist anyway.

How are we supposed to elect people who will actually reverse the dreadful policies that have been foisted on us?

I don’t know. I wish I did. Talk is cheap. Actions are what matter, but we don’t know what actions they’ll take until it’s too late.

All we can do is hope for the best because we’re already seeing the worst and we sure don’t want any more of that.

Golden Horde

The Mongol Empire: The Golden Horde

Here’s a nifty little history lesson for you.

One of the big problems that have happened among the most noteworthy empires of history is that while the likes of Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and Genghis Khan have conquered rather impressive swaths of the Earth’s surface, such empires never survive their deaths.

In the case of Alexander, he died rather unexpectedly and his empire was split up among his generals.

In the case of Charlemagne and Ghenghis Khan, they lived to a ripe old age and deliberately split their empires among their sons.

The Carolingian Empire wound up becoming France and Germany with a detour through the Holy Roman Empire. The Mongol Empire was bequeathed to the Great Khan’s four sons, breaking it into sizeable regions known as the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, the Ilkhanate and Yuan Dynasty China.

Even so divided, these post-empire states were both huge and influential. One wonders if either of the great rulers had handed the whole thing to a single son in its entirety, how differently history would have turned out.

The Horde (Russian movie with English subtitles)

Here’s a movie about medieval Russia’s interaction with their Mongol overlords. I’m looking at this and the series playlist below as an inspiration for Tales Of Olde Auringia.

Yes, I’m getting way ahead of myself since I actually need to be focusing on The Sentinels, but there’s no harm in planting some Auringian flavor into my subconscious for future development.

The Golden Horde

Logical Imagination

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. ~Albert Einstein

That’s the creative credo in a nutshell, I guess.

To tell a coherent story, you have to marry the flights of fancy with the constraints of consistency.

Even if you’re engaging in flights of complete fancy, you still need to get it to hang together rationally.

Getting from one plot point to another takes more than a hand wave, a magic wand or a shower of sparks.

I’ve been doing that instinctively as I write the Holiday Season Serial Romance, but completing and publishing a series is going to take more of both logic and imagination.