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According to Webster's, an Analogy is defined as "a comparison of two things based on them being alike in some way".

What do all great communicators have in common? They communicate through analogies. The easiest way to be sure that someone understands something is to find something that they already understand and to identify the points of similarity.

What analogies make possible is for us to understand something starting from a position of 100% understanding rather than from scratch.

OK - I guess I have to explain the Sedation Dentistry thing now. Last month I hired someone to remove a very large and imposing and mostly dead willow tree from the front of a vacation cottage that I own. The job involves heavy equipment, moving electric lines, and people working with chainsaws at dizzying heights.

I hired someone who I trust and know to be very competent and I only made one stipulation - that I didn't want to know about any of the details and I didn't even want to know the day he was doing the work. This is the type of thing that I would worry a lot about, so I just wanted it to be like sedation dentistry - I only wanted to know about it when it was already over and the job was done.

Rather than going into a long explanation, I just made this analogy and Russ know just how to proceed and he did exactly what I wanted him to do. One day I got a happy surprise of a picture of neatly stacked wood where a tree used to be and he immediately received payment in full!

OK, now let's do some magic. Let's find an analogy to put us at peace with the current insanity going on in our political world. Sedation dentistry is tempting, but it just doesn't work for me because I am enjoying this show too much. Cruise Control doesn't work because I am definitely not the one driving. So - the best I can do is to say we are reading an amazingly good book.

Great fiction tends to have the following ingredients: An inciting incident to get the plot rolling, a protagonist, an antagonist, conflict, and - finally - a resolution. When you know and trust the author, you don't know the ending, but you have confidence that it will be a positive and satisfying one.

I suffered through a movie that actually made me angry a few years back - "No Country for Old Men" - please don't waste your time on it if you haven't already done so - it had a horrifically bad ending - it was bad because it was in no way satisfying and couldn't possibly have been predicted. After seeing the ending, I was angry and regretted having watched the movie.

The happy thing about the movie that we are watching is that the storyline has been so consistent that it's author is truly an artist and it would be utterly out of character and utterly absurd for all of this to be leading up to a giant disappointment which resolves nothing. I could easily cop out and just make the analogy to faith, but faith means "belief without proof" and I see proof everywhere I look.

I think it was @Andre who first made the analogy of the current situation to how a black hole is detected - not by seeing the hole itself, but by witnessing the behavior of everything around it. This is how I am following the plot of the movie - I am watching everything that goes on and just making sure that I don't see a contradiction to what I believe the plot is.

While I am delighted to have been a part of creating Free Atlantis and I thoroughly enjoy checking in and watching everyone communicate freely here, I really don't personally have much to say these days.

I am just patiently watching as much as I have time to watch of what is going on around us and keeping my eyes opened for scary contradictions that would tell me that we are all genuinely screwed and otherwise I am just very happy to see that all of the craziness going on in the world is fitting the pattern that I would expect as the plot in this great book builds and builds.

Nothing the left does is working and they keep getting more and more desperate and threatening worse and worse offenses, but nothing they do works. Their desperation is like a fine perfume to me. Nothing that I can do or say will help other than just staying positive and helping those around me to do the same.

I understand that everyone desperately wants to know exactly what is going on and I enjoy watching everyone's daily wild speculation. It is part of reading a good book or watching a good movie to speculate on what is going on and how it will end.

I have done my share of speculation too, but it is getting old and now what I desperately want is to know how this book will end, but I have seen enough to know that the author is a gifted one and I am confident enough to be sure that the ending will not be a disappointment! We are no watching No Country for Old Men - we are for sure reading one of the greatest stories ever written!!

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@Bryan So true - the Pioneers for example built railroads that cross the continent (US for you and Australia for me)…. today’s mob struggle to connect adjacent suburbs.