"It's not poo, daddy. It's dirt."

Hello! Lars here.

Hope your day is well above average. :)

It's pure bedlam here at Lars Emmerich Headquarters. At the headquarters are three children. They live here.

It's not really a headquarters as much as it's... a house.

But I'm fond of pomp and circumstance, so we'll go with 'headquarters.'

The two-year-old is going through a nakedness phase. No problem... except that she's not yet down with doing her business in the toilet.

Have there been 'surprises' left in strategic locations around the headquarters facility?

I'm sad to report, yes.

Did a certain author step in a 'hidden gem' and proceed to spread the gift throughout the house via the bottom of his shoe?

Again, yes.

These are the times that try men's souls, as somebody smart and famous once said.

And what did my daughter have to say for herself?

"It's not poo, daddy. It's just dirt."

Which brings us to today's topic: propaganda!

My wife gets the Denver Business Journal. They gave her an award, so she felt compelled to buy a subscription. We occasionally read the articles, which are occasionally informative.

I ran across an absolutely beautiful piece of propaganda in the esteemed Journal the other day.

Topic: Denver's lawmakers recently passed legislation that restricts which homes may be legally posted on Air BnB for short-term rental. Each denizen of Denver may only list his or her primary residence on Air BnB.

If you're not familiar, Air BnB is a service that matches people who have vacant homes or apartments available for short-term rental with people who are searching for short-term accommodations.

It's a perfect little example of capitalism done right...

With one glaring 'problem': All of the renting of short-term accommodations on Air BnB is occurring WITHOUT the involvement of corporations like Hilton and Marriott.

And it's also occurring without the City and County of Denver taking its skim off the top, as well.

In fact, these person-to-person short-term rentals are taking a serious bite out of the hotel industry.

So...

If you're Hilton and Marriott... and you have money to buy politicians...

You get a law passed!

"Only a person's primary residence may be listed for short-term rental. Other properties MAY NOT be used for short-term accommodations."

So says the law.

In Denver.

Which is in America.

Which is the land of the free.

And also the land of opportunity.

Unless the opportunity you're pursuing is the opportunity to rent more than one home.

That's right out.

Because it's now against the law... and Denver City and County have just hired six new enforcement officers to cross-check short-term rental listings on 50 of the most popular peer-to-peer short-term rental sights on the web.

A million bucks a year in salary and overhead added to the Denver budget...

All to help those poor, ailing global hotel companies. The poor dears. My heart goes out to them.

Not to mention the lost hospitality tax revenue.

My heart goes out to the city, too. Poor dears.

That's not the propaganda part. That's just the business-as-usual corruption part. Everywhere you find humans, you find corruption like this.

Even here in the "Developed World." :)

Now... I wonder... Would Denver authorities dare to let slip the real reason for the outrageous infringement of personal economic freedom?

Hell no!

Here's the gorgeous little tale:

"People who buy houses to list them as short-term rentals raise our cost of living by driving home prices up."

Delivered with a straight face.

As if people who buy houses to list them as long-term rentals... or to live in them... don't also cause home prices to rise?

How many people are buying million-dollar homes to rent them out for the weekend? Do the economics even make sense?

It prompts a person to ask... Honestly... does anyone believe this crap?

The answer, I think, is yes but no.

Some people believe it completely.

Some people don't believe it at all.

Most people have a sense that it's bullshit, have a sense that they're being managed and manipulated, but don't feel they have the agency to do anything about it.

And since each reduction of personal and collective agency is small and relatively harmless -- not enough to start a revolution over, for sure -- we mostly go along with it.

Which is the whole point of propaganda: to give us a semi-plausible story that dissuades us from digging too much further, even though it's often obvious there's much more to find by digging.

Here's another interesting aspect of propaganda: we believe it not because it's entirely believable, but because the truth is much more disturbing. We would rather not confront it. The truth has implications we're not prepared for.

Like cleaning baby poop off of the floor in a thousand different places in your house.

So much better if it's just dirt!

:)

What does all this dribble have to do with fiction?

I don't know.

Wait.... yes I do.

Here it is:

Hidden conspiracies of all varieties form the backdrop for many of my novels.

Conspiracies always have "contact points" -- places where the conspiracy interfaces with the legitimate world.

A money-laundering scheme requires seemingly-legitimate businesses as fronts. These fronts are the interfaces between the conspiracy and the everyday world.

You have to concoct a story around these interfaces to keep people from digging too deeply. Plausible, innocuous, largely believable but not entirely...

Which sounds a lot like propaganda.

So propaganda figures prominently in the mechanism of conspiracy, and you'll find a lot of examples of it sprinkled throughout my novels.

Which, by the way, I hope you're enjoying! 

Until next time,

Lars

PS - I'll take 10% off your next purchase using checkout code "NOTPOODADDY" at checkout. Click here to browse around.