Time for bed and I've wasted a day arguing with seemingly every useless, part-of-the-problem, I-know-half-of-this-story shitmonger on this hellscape of a platform, and by that I mean every mook who thinks you can rationalize the barbarism of Hamas, or every scrote who thinks...
...that the affront of the settlement policy and the increasing ruthlessness of the West Bank settlement policy is anything but a disaster for any peace process, or every submoron who thinks Jew or Arab, Israeli or Palestinian has a clean, clear purchase on this complicated...
...history, or that either side can ever wash itself clean of complicity in trying to avoid the inevitable reality, that two wounded peoples need to share a land, that some portion will be a Jewish homeland for another 75 years, but not unless there is corresponding statehood...
...for Palestine, and that any festering shitbag ideological rage-harvesting liar who wants to pretend that all this hate and violence will drive 9 million Jews into the sea or make their Semitic brethren ever concede that their national aspirations will not be realized, is....
..simply another cell on a long, metastasizing cancer that devours innocent lives, well, add your trollery, anger and singular, one-sided imaginings to this thread and come morning, I'll wipe you all clean in one devoted burst of blockage. You're no good to anyone -- Israeli or..
Palestinian, Arab or Jew. You're just another small part of the great heaving, clogging fistula of shit that bars the way to the only plausible future that isn't caked in blood and gore. Fuck Hamas. Fuck Netanyahu. Fuck the Iranians. Fuck the settlers. Fuck everyone ready to...
...monologue on one half of this long, ornate, tragic tale of a half century or more while magically forgetting every last shard of your brother's half. You will share the same narrative, and begin at least to contemplate the whole tale and everyone's shared complicity, or you...
...will keep preaching to your rancid, rote-brained choirs and bleed together for another few generations. You will either learn to share the land, to cede some fair measure of a shared future or you will, every useless, hate-engorged squib on every side of this horror, learn...
...to bleed into the same gutter. If you think you come away clean from your history, your religion, your ideology, you are a fool and you will never begin the long march back from hell. And there are so many of you assholes that, admittedly, it will be a long road indeed. But...
honestly, in the name of Yahweh and Allah both, and Christ himself if he's fool enough to show up, go fuck yourself to hell if you seriously think that you know enough to claim to be with anyone clean in this maelstrom. In the very claim, in your hunger to be...
...singularly right and to have the other soul be singularly wrong, you reveal your amoral greed, your ahistorical stupidity and your corrupted, empty soul. Fuck you all. And to those remainder with the capacity to think in human-scale complexities and never let go of anyone's...
...human spirit, I'll see you tomorrow when maybe I'll write exactly what I mean and we can coherently discuss. And, conversely, that everyone with anger, hate and cheap certainty in their soul is ever angry at me in equal measure, because again, you assholes at both extremes...
....holding all of us and peace itself by the throat, can eat an overstuffed bag of stale, unsalted dicks. You're useless to any actual solution ever. You are the fucking problem. And that is enough sincerity for one man on the end of a bad day.
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Mini-thread: Some inside baseball for you. The Wire's numbers look decent for the first two seasons but it's all illusion. Until season three the Nielsens counted all HBO viewing -- HBO 1, HBO 2, HBO Spanish, HBO Fam -- under one single number....
....beginning with our season 3, the ratings entity began to break down viewing into each distinct HBO platform. So our numbers tumbled dramatically. The honest fact is that probably 40 percent of our perceived ratings the first two seasons were actually watching other HBO....
....programming. This was true of all HBO shows in those years but of course when a Sopranos episode aired, maybe 5 percent of a much larger number was not watching. So actual hits showed some modest decline. We lost damn near half our make-believe audience. Fact is no one....
1) Not to excuse Hunter Biden from trading on his father's name -- or the Kushner couple from trading much better on Trump's, but it's about time to admit that influence peddling is not at all a crime under the U.S. code. It is legal. Congress has left it as a hole that....
2) ...all parties involved in our governance and their friends and relations can drive a truck through. Extortion is a crime under the law. Bribery is a crime. But earning money by talking horseshit about how you know and who will listen to you is the premise of the K Street....
3) ....lobbying class. Federal prosecutors have a name for the activity that involved people talking shit and pumping up their influence for salary and consulting fees. "Rainmaking." A player goes to the chump and says if you hire me, I can make it rain. Rain being whatever...
Thread: Very sad to learn that Bill Friedkin, one of the finest directors of the 1970s American film insurgency is no longer with us. He was a master. And while others are better equipped to assess his life and legacy, I have a small, personal anecdote to contribute. It will...
...sound at points like a humble-brag and maybe it is, but I promise, in the end, the joke is on me. In any event: It is April of 1991 and I am working a weekend rewrite shift at the Baltimore Sun and trapped in the doldrums of a slow night. To my memory, I was filling in...
...the late high temps on the weather table and checking to make sure I haven't transposed digits to deliver a high of 19 Fahrenheit to Phoenix. That sort of bullshit. Phone rings. Ettlin, the night editor, answers: "Simon. Line 1." I pick up, "Simon. Metro."
There is a pause.
1) Thread for today: I am not going to opine on the Supreme Court's ruling except to tell a story about a late and valued friend. The story will suffice for the sum of my thoughts about affirmative action.
I was working at the student newspaper at the University of Maryland...
2) ...a broadsheet daily, when I meet a young man from Prince George's County named David Mills. He, too, wanted to write and edit for the Diamondback. I had grown up in a more affluent county and attended better public schools, but David had done well in high school...
...clocking good grades, working on the school paper and participating in the It's Academic team. I had edited my high school paper, but I was an indifferent student. As an in-state Maryland resident in 1978, I knew that even my low-B average and moderate SAT scores would get...
1) Thread: This is fun, and I can add a bit of trivial material that while highlighting my early incompetence as a newspaperman, makes the Free State look a smidge better for it's tardiness. So let's go back to 1983 when I was a skinny lad with hair and ambitions to write...
2) My way on to the Baltimore Sun. I was still a student at UM, covering College Park and the suburban Maryland counties as a stringer, meaning they paid me by the story. I was looking for any byline possible and I came upon a rape case in Prince George's County...
...that was notable in that some asshole who had been tried and acquitted on rape on two prior occasions had been found not guilty a third time by a county jury that nonetheless found him guilty of a peverted sex act. Meaning, they thought the sex consensual, but his testimony...
Small thread: So last night, with a DeMille-like bat mitzvah in the rear-view and the laundry done, I settled in to watch something by my lonesome. Randomly picked "The Story of Emile Zola" with the great Paul Muni. Academy Award winner for Best Pic...
...Knew of it and its place in cinematic lore, but never actually watched it. Bottom line: Muni, who was Brando before Brando, is naturalistic and great and worth the watch. But when you get to the Dreyfus Affair the entire thing shits the bed...
...Yup, at the moment that the French generals decide to scapegoat Dreyfus as the traitor the word "Jew" is never uttered, nor is anti-Semitism referenced. Instead there is only an insert shot of a personnel summary of Dreyfus and the camera pans down to a single...