Seriously?  Why no mention of either in this book?

I mean these are a pair of super-secret Illuminati-type conspiracy groups engaged in a shadow war. If they were appearing all the time, they wouldn't be very good at their jobs.

Just checked, and like I thought, it comes up in Cold Case

Have you heard of the Old Ones?”
“I don’t think it’s a very kind nickname for the Rolling Stones. They still put on a great show.”
He nodded and squinted at me. “I kind of need you to put on your serious face now.”
“That bad?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “They’re … kind of a collection of entities. Really old, really powerful entities.”
“What, like gods?” I asked.
“Like the things gods have nightmares about,” he said.
“Outsiders.”
He nodded. “Only they aren’t outside. They’re here. Caged, bound, and sleeping, but they’re here.”
“That seems kind of dangerous.”
“Yes and no,” he said. “They feed on psychic energy. On fear. On the collective subconscious awareness of them that exists within humanity.”
I squinted at him. “Meaning what?”
“The more people who know about them and fear them, the more awake and more powerful they become,” he said. “That’s why the people who know about them don’t talk about them much.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of beer in Unalaska?”
“One of the Old Ones is known as the Sleeper. It’s said his tomb is somewhere under the Pacific. And that goddamned moron Lovecraft published stories and easy-to-remember rhymes about the thing.” He shook his head. “The signal boost gave the Sleeper enough power to influence the world. It has a number of cults. People get … infested, I guess. Slowly go insane. Lose their humanity. Turn into something else.”

You have to understand, it's implied from what Lash said at the end of White Night that she (and by extension Bonnie) has a great deal of information that is integral to the metaplot and can't be revealed just yet because it would make Harry's life to easy.

So instead she gets to be a genius with all the answers that is simultaneously too dumb to realize she has to hand them out until the last 3 chapters of whatever book they become relevant in.

Just as an example, she 99% knows all about what a starborn is, she can probably tell Harry exactly what Nick's been up to, may well have a bunch of information about what the Black Council has been up to...

Like, she has to be useless, or we don't get a story.

I concur with this theory..  It fits with my theory that Justine had been infested from the beginning.  Lord Raith knows full well who the half brother of Thomas is, he may even know what Harry is, so Justine infected thrown together with Thomas as a way to control him.  Also knowing that Thomas and Harry will get together at some point so eventually a way to get at Harry.  And as we saw at the end of Battleground it almost worked.

According to Blood Rites, Lord Raith somehow didn't know who the half-brother of Thomas was until he spied them discussing it in his mansion. Otherwise he no doubt would have tried to kill Harry earlier.

This bothers me, too.

Not just with the Thomas/Justine:  why TF is this (obvious) method not part of the toolkit that every whampire knows??!?

They use sex for feeding their Hunger... but also as a critical tool for political power.
They're used to thinking of sex, and sexual permutations, as tools.
They have zero expectations of sexual fidelity:  each Whampire has multiple kine, and many kine get passed around amongst the Whamps; gifted, loaned, traded, &c.

They know of "sex outside of love" as the "magic key" to get past the "True Love" protections.
They should know "have willing, friendly sex to break TL protections" and then renew said protections (when they make love to their TL) as the way to move forward.

Remember, the White Court thought that Thomas was a freak for loving a human in the first place- kinda like how people would look at a man that married a cow.

Love is not, broadly speaking, a thing that the White Court do.

That did backfire on her with the swords, however, since she had been "contaminated" in her faith by hanging out with Odin's people and therefor she did waver in her convictions. Or that's how I interpreted it, I could be quite off here.

IMO it has nothing to do with Odin. The Swords (or at least their true purpose) were never Murphy's style.

She's great when fighting outright monsters like the Red Court, but... well, she was always about punishing the guilty as much as protecting the innocent. It's like she said to Harry in Skin Game:

"I don't want to save [Denarians]".

That is the core of the issue. And to her credit, she knows it- it's why she rejected the thing in the first place.

I mean, Thomas is going to spend an indeterminate amount of time on Hell Island reliving everything he did to his victims. If anything, he's being overly-punished and anyone that finds out is gonna think that Dresden has absolutely zero chill.

But without Ethniu would the Fomor even of had a chance? Or rather much of a chance?  She was their bad ass terror weapon with a very nasty eye, without her the Fomor were really quite run of the mill in the Dresdenverse.

Like, you say that, but apparently these rejects and outcasts have been literally shitting all over every faction in the Dresden Files for literally years at this point, doing whatever they want without any response because reasons, with no Titan in site until Peace Talks.

The entire reason they even had the Peace Talks is because the Formor were shit-stomping all the Accorded Nations simultaneously. Somehow.

Agreed.  What changed… for Dumorne to see a need to change his methods?

My personal theory is that since we now know hhwb wasn't sent by Justin, he was sent for him.

Which meant that Justin (who had hijacked Maggie's Starborn plan for his own ends) needed Harry and Elaine ready early, which meant abandoning traditional brainwashing/conditioning in favour of Magical alternatives.

Unfortunately for him, hhwb was able to turn Justin's anti-outsider wmd against him.

Harry summoned Uriel into a mental circle.

And Uriel response was to tell him 'LOL that's cute'.

The Circle isn't there to summon the creature, it's so that whatever you summon doesn't eat your face.