Early Saturday Update

We have a niece's bat mitzvah to attend on Saturday, so welcome to Friday's Saturday update.

The United States traded an arms dealer to Russia for a WNBA player. We should have held out for a player to be named later. 

The Jerusalem Post writes up the sad, turgid story of Benjamin Netanyahu's month-long effort to form a government and the mandate extension granted by the president to do same. Stroock's Books does not like this government nor does it like the deals Bibi made to form this government. Oh well. Israel wanted a hard right government. Israel voted for this hard right government. And Israel deserves this hard right government. Reminder, Israel's hard right government pisses off all the right (left) people. 

Meanwhile Israel Radar warns 2023 is going to see a huge spike in Arab terror. 'Terrorism in the West Bank will likely erupt in full force during the month of Ramadan in March-April 2023, military officials estimate. Gaza and Jerusalem are also in danger of a major flare-up of violence, the army warned.' Ahh....the holy month of Ramadan. One can already smell the fires and see the car-swarms. We look forward to Israel's fun, new assassination methods. Mossad very often has a sense of humor about these things.

Last night Bari Weiss posted a long Twitter thread about Twitter blocking, backlisting and shadow banning users. We mentioned Matt Taibbi's reporting on Twitter policies yesterday and wrote about old fashioned media biased. That is, in the 80s and 90s the media didn't pretend certain events happened while insisting other events didn't happen. Dan Rather may have been a liberal Dem, but back then he didn't want Republicans to die in a grease fire. 

We worked at CNN Inside Politics for six months in 1999. Yes CNN was biased, we got a staffer to admit they liked to use a bad picture of Linda Tripp. But they had ethics. On our second day we heard the head of the Political Unit discussing if rumors of George W Bush using cocaine were true. And if true, we're these rumors even newsworthy? Imagine MSNBC sitting on that today. Also, one night Algoe was scheduled to guest host for Larry King. King was a big, big deal in those days. There was a staffer revolt, we saw it live. People simply thought that since Gore was running for president, it would be inappropriate for him to guest host. Here's a writeup on the matter from the WaPo.* 

Things.

We had a very good week editing World War 1990: The Final Storm. The prep and planning chapter is looking much better and making much more sense. We'll even say we had a breakthrough yesterday. Now the chapter scenes bounce around in a consistent manner; Washington to Moscow, Washington to Bornholm, Washington to Dixie Station, etc etc. 

We won't say we're optimistic about the rest of TFS. But we will say we spent the autumn busting our hump writing and editing the aerial attack and SAS scenes. Those scenes have gotta be in pretty good shape, right? Right? 

We had an even better week reading The New American Order. We are halfway done. Remaining to read are the refugee and the 1980 political chapters. This readthrough will be complete by the end of next week. Assuming all the things go as all the things have been going, we'll be through all the rest of the things by the end of next week.  From there we'll finish the foreign venture chapter and the future history chapter. TNAO will be released before TFS.

No such luck finding a third writing project to write. On the research front, we haven't gotten much done. Years ago we used to sit in the TV room and read while the Stroocklettes watched cartoons. We don't need to do that anymore since they're at evening dance or on their phones. Maybe we're just older, but we just don't feel like researching at night right now.

Sales of The Aftermath of 1976 are progressing exactly as we had thought/hoped/foreseen. 

We've done a good job of staying away from politics this last month. Yes, we know what's going on. No we haven't followed events in minute detail the way we used to. Still, we think we can purge politics even more from our life. We've taken this time to think and rethink or loyalty to the GOP. What have they ever done for us? Yes there are victories but not nearly enough to warrant getting angry and losing sleep.

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