The point of bringing up sexual harassment is that adult's decision making is compromised when their teacher is asking them something. That's why professors aren't allowed to sleep with their students.

Your teacher shouldn't be asking you for sex and he shouldn't be asking you to risk your life and potentially go dark side. And an apprentice's master has even more authority over her than a professor or teacher.

How are you going to get these experts? If the government somehow convinces some people to lie on TV, there are going to be quadruple that number taking them to task in public. If they use fake experts, everyone in those fields is going to be scratching their heads where these people came from and that is going to rapidly be public information.

It was the Iranians? What coherent explanation is going to make that make sense? With what weapons? How did they move that many personnel in secret? These things are impossible. No one is going to believe that. Even the average lay person is going to have a hard time swallowing this kind of explanation. Especially since we have 8 million witnesses and tons of physical evidence. You are also forgetting that an accusation like that is going to be refuted by Iran and everyone else internationally. It would be impossible to generate convincing false evidence of an attack on this scale and very easily falsified. Large troop and weapons movements cannot be hidden easily, and they are never covered up long term. This just does not happen.

-If the truth comes out later the lie will be worse than useless. It will backfire. Nobody lies when they know for certain that they wont be able to pull off the lie. That defeats the purpose.

Same place they already get experts for hire. The key thing is that no one will be able to contradict them without sounding like lunatics to anyone who wasn't in Chicago. They don't need to invent experts, just provide them with words to say. The experts will also want to believe an easier truth, as well. It's very difficult to refute something without being able to provide an alternative explanation. The innocent and guilty alike would say "it wasn't us but we have no clue what actually happened."

There's less than eight million survivors. That's not the same thing as witnesses. Not to mention, the lie isn't about anything that happened. It would be about why things happened. Since barely anyone knows why the attack happened, the lie will be fairly resilient.

Never underestimate the stupidity of politicians facing an out-of-context crisis.

This would be highly out of character for the U.S. government. The U.S. Government has done its fair share of unseemly acts, but completely making up an enemy and attacking them as a cover up is something it has never done. If there is some event like this that I am not aware of it either happened a very long time ago or was not done on this kind of scale.

And there is a reason it has not been done on this kind of scale, if ever. Governments cannot cover up things on this kind of scale, and blaming a foreign power or terrorist group would be so easily falsified that it would be completely pointless to try. Not only would be incredibly easy to falsify, but there would be too many layers of government involved for this to even be practical. Something like a CIA coup in the 1950's or 1960's was possible without anyone knowing because the entire operation was clandestine and could be authorized and carried out without having to involve anyone outside of the executive branch. This wont work with the battle of Chicago because it is a massive event and everyone will be involved. Congress, state governments, local governments etc.

I'm pretty sure they've done it since WW2 but I don't feel like looking it up right now. It's true that real false flag attacks, by any government, aren't on this scale.

However, the lie could go farther than you think. After all, they didn't invent an attack. If you line up enough "experts" to go out there and say "It was the Iranians!" enough people will fall for it because they will want to believe that there's something that can be done to stop it from happening again. The alternative is for the President to go on record saying "there is no effective action we can take to stop this from happening again." That's just not going to happen.

Will the truth come out? Sure. But the only people who have anything close to a complete and accurate picture of what happened aren't talking because they're the ones who decided to cover it up. By the time there's clear and convincing evidence it wasn't Iran, or whoever, the consequences of the lie will be manifest and there will be no going back.

Even just denying everyone an official narrative that lines up with reality would do a great deal to obfuscate what happened. One of the major weaknesses of conspiracy theories is that you have conflicting explanations for the same event. So the government says terrorists which is obviously garbage but none of the stories coming out of Chicago agree with each other. Some people are saying aliens and other people are saying fairies and other people say it was the Iranians and still others saying it was a Chinese attack and other other people are saying the Feds were testing an EMP device and it went horribly wrong.  There isn't one voice providing an explanation and there'd be almost nothing of what we've gotten used to qualifying as evidence.

So I don't think the cover-up will result in large numbers of people believing the official narrative but it will allow people to reject uncomfortable facts about what happened.

The big thing we aren't going to get answered is how it would affect US domestic and international politics. Responsibility for the attack would have to be assigned to someone and that someone would be destroyed.

Butcher made a point of saying the Winter Knight was dangerous in the cold and the dark but we didn't get to see any real WK mojo. Resisting cold is fine and all but not very interesting.

We know soulgazes are mediated by the recipient, Harry gets images and video but I think Ramirez get music. I think the recipient's frame of reference also affected what they experience. So everyone gets a different version of Harry. That's why the normal people who soulgazed Harry are gibbering over whatever it was that could frighten a kraken. They see the parts of Harry that matter to them.

Though I'm pretty amazed that kraken qualify as people enough to get a soulgaze. Do the rules of magic then apply? It's kind of alarming, to be honest.

When the Thomas short story was written, Butcher didn't think the Oblivion War would even impinge enough on Harry to make into the main series. It was still the case when Butcher revealed that the war was orchestrated by the Archive.

He might have changed his mind, but for the moment, I think that's grounds to dismiss the Oblivion War as an explanation for Thomas' actions.

I like how Butcher has Harry level up in response to the pressures he's under. He gets better at blowing things up because of the war; he gets better at subtle work because he needs to teach Molly. I wouldn't be surprised if his hermit period trying to find a cure for vampirism laid the foundations for his later improvements in enchanting.

I don't remember, does he beef up his duster in response to almost getting sniped in the Michael short story?

It's surprising how old the questions are. A lot of the questions/answers here seemed focused on writing as opposed to plot.

Not unreasonable, especially since after such a long hiatus people who aren't obsessive interested about the series may not remember enough to ask about plot details. I tried to talk to my sister about the micro fiction and she didn't know who people were.