Jack of Harts

Raconteur Press is putting out another anthology this weekend, this one about powerful artifacts and where they come from. While you are waiting for the story to reach Amazon and go online, you may want to check out the Goblin Market by Raconteur Press. It includes my story, Goblins in the Marketplace, that is built around the idea of a powerful artifact. What is it? That’s a question for another day. But this story also introduces the Shiny Thing that finds itself in many of my stories. What is it? Who can tell? When goblins believe in something, what can they do with it? Go to the Goblin Market and see for yourselves how it started.

It is not a small thing when a life-long Democrat accuses the last mentally-functional Democrat President of committing treason. It’s even bigger when she is the head of the Department of National Intelligence, brings the receipts, gives them to the Department of Justice, and calls for prosecutions. What happened?

According to what we are told, President Obama received a Presidential Daily Brief after the 2016 election that said the Russians did not hack the 2016 election that Trump won. He did not like that briefing and ordered another created that showed how they did it. Then the new briefing information was leaked to the news media, which started all the rumors of Trump belonging to Russia. Which caused the FBI investigation, which arrested some of Trump’s people, and mired the first Trump Administration in controversy and impeachments.

The charge is that President Obama used the intelligence agencies of America to sabotage his political opponent. And the word treason is used. This is not small. This is very big. Now I’m not going to say that people are going to do prison time. As we all know, we live in at least a two-tier justice system, where big wig Democrats don’t get charged for breaking the law. But if the receipts back the charges, this is one of the largest Presidential scandals of American history. We need to see the receipts, and if this true, people need to go to prison for the health of the Republic. Because if people can do this, be discovered to do have done it, and still walk free, our Republic is over.

I went to two different malls on Friday and Saturday. One in my hometown and one up in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. My own hometown mall has always been a mall that has prospered despite the general fall of malls throughout America. It has always been the one that was always busy and always crowded. It was the place people in my town went to always. On Friday at 6PM most of the parking lot was empty. And the people inside were… distant. I remember in the past we would have been dodging people every few steps. Now there were maybe a dozen people in an entire hallway. It was amazing just how few people were there. Some stores even closed at 5PM. The mall used to require that all stores remain open as long as the mall was open. Such is no longer the case.

And I went to the Mall of America on Saturday. There were a lot of people there, but we arrived at noon. In the past, before the Covid lockdowns, we would not have gotten a parking spot at that time. Now we had our pick of spots on one of the main parking floors. And while there were a lot of people there, and while we did have to dodge people every few steps, it was nothing like the past. I was able to walk up to Long John Silvers and buy some hushpuppies with only one person ahead of me. And we were able to walk through Camp Snoopy without any problems. The lines for the rides didn’t even overflow out into the main walking routes.

This is the first time I’ve been back to either mall during what should be a main shopping time since before the Covid lockdowns, and I did not realize how much traffic has dipped. It is a sad day for to see them so… uncrowded. Life is changing, and I do not like the way it is changing.