#and most are primed to implode

[starrblossom12]

Have you ever heard of that myth about lemmings? Yeah... so... it's not a really a myth with this team...

[mister-eve]

but when does a comet become a meteor? when does a candle become a blaze? when does a boy man become a monster?

when does a ripple become a tidal wave? when does the reason become the blame? when does a boy man become a MONSTER?

forgive me... forgive me.... forgive me.....

i'm

just

a

boy

man... - Just A Man by Jorge Rivera-Herrans

[alpacaroni-and-cheese]

Leah and Fatin, A Journey of Forgiveness

Spoilers for The Wilds seasons 1 and 2 Trigger warning for brief mention of a canon suicide attempt. Be safe before you read <3

Throughout the first season of Amazon Prime's series, The Wilds, you could be forgiven for thinking that Leatin (or Latin, for the OGs) was a rarepair. A crackship, if you will.

They had some intensely homoerotic moments (wiping your own blood on your rival's face? I see you, Fatin) and some deeply important and emotional moments (see my previous essay), but for most watchers of the show, they weren't much more than semi-strangers to lowkey friends to bitter enemies to close friends.

But then season 2 came out.

Forgive me, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's go back to the beginning of the season.

Leah has pulled herself out of a man-made pit designed by the experimenters who are threatened by her. She's so desperately close to unravelling the whole sick and twisted game, she just has to show the others the pit, and then they'll believe her.

When she gets back to the beach, however, there's no time to go looking for the pit, triumphant and vindicated, because Rachel is dying. A large portion of her arm has been bitten off by a shark. She needs a hospital and trained professionals, but the best they have are antibiotics and an understanding that bleeding is bad. The open wound is cauterised and bandaged to within an inch of its life.

Did I mention all of this is happening while epiphany by Taylor Swift plays in the background? Soul destroying stuff.

Anyway, now that Rachel isn't actively dying, Leah can drag Fatin away to find the pit, but it's gone.

Leah can't believe it. She knows it was real, and she knows Nora put her in there. She knows she didn't imagine it, but the proof is all gone. The truth has once again slipped through her fingers.

Fatin, on the other hand, is only growing more and more concerned for Leah. For some context, Leah's near-drowning experience only happened just a couple of days prior, so from Fatin's perspective, this could easily be a worsening of Leah's mental state. If she's hallucinated this pit, then she's quickly going to become a greater danger to herself and to the others. Fatin now not only has to especially worry about Rachel, but Leah as well.

And Fatin is tired. She's exhausted, and her threads are pulled taut, ready to snap.

The episode jumps ahead a little, just a few days, and we see that Leah is still searching for the pit. She's disappearing for hours at a time, under the pretence of doing something vaguely useful (like gathering wood for the signal fire) but returning with little to no real progress made.

Fatin notices all this, because of course she does.

She tries to convince Leah it was just a mirage, but Leah doesn't budge. She can't budge, because finding the pit is her only real way of knowing she hasn't completely lost it.

The group is moving camp from outside on the beach to inside the forest, so everybody is gathering up their stuff and moving it in-land. Leah's helping, sort of, but she's still lost in her spiral.

Leah believes that she needs answers, and the person who can best give her those answers is lost to the waves, presumed dead. So she goes for the next best thing, too caught up in her own monsoon of guilt, paranoia and unflinching desire to find the truth to realise that the answers she's trying to find are not as important as protecting Rachel's fragile heart and mind.

Before anyone can step in and stop the inevitable fracturing, she prods, and Rachel implodes.

All of the girls rush forward to Rachel. Some, like Toni, stand guard, facing Leah and warning her not to come closer. Others, like Shelby and Martha gently soothe and comfort Rachel, whose grief and guilt is on full display.

Fatin, however, is furious.

She grabs Leah and drags her to the cliffs, shoving her up against the cliff-face.

She snarls, teeth bared in anger. Leah causing hurt to herself was bad enough, but the escalation to hurting Rachel was a step too far.

Fatin bites, tearing into the soft, exposed underbelly.

"You take your delusions, and you take your theories, and you fucking bury them, now! And if you ever take them within 100 feet of Rachel again, I'll fucking kill you."

These words will haunt her, but she has a point. Leah was wrong for interrogating Rachel.

Confronted with the fact that she hurt Rachel, and exhausted of the ceaseless noise bouncing around in her head that something is wrong, Leah makes a decision. A bad one.

She overdoses. Later, she'll say she didn't really want to die, she just wanted to stop feeling.

We don't see the immediate fallout, episode 2 picks up a couple of days later. Leah is near-catatonic, lying on a bed of bamboo. Rachel is nearby, in a similar state.

Fatin, Toni and Dot sit together close by, and Fatin is tearing strips off clothing to make new bandages for Rachel.

Fatin is scared. More scared than she's ever been before in her life. She's filled with guilt, and wishing she didn't have to deal with this reality.

So she pretends that she doesn't care, because that's easier than facing her fear and her guilt. She knows, deep down, that despite her anger being righteous, she went too far.

"What matters is, she's alive, and she's finally fucking quiet."

Rachel, who is sick of being babied, and likely just a bit pissed off at Fatin's insensitivity, resolves to get Leah up and moving herself. To the surprise of all present, it works. Leah breaks out of her catatonia and stumbles after her.

They spend some time together, sharing a real, honest conversation. They've spoken to each other before, obviously, but this is the first time each one is sharing their true selves. No more facades of being a better person than they are, no more ulterior motives. Just Leah and Rachel.

They forgive each other, and themselves, forging an unbreakable bond.

They bring out in each other the first real joy they've felt in days, maybe even weeks (just look at their faces!).

Fatin sees Leah healing, and shares in her joy. Although, maybe now she's starting to have some revelations...

2x03 sees Leah and Rachel spending more time together. Their bond deepens, and the two characters who have been the most tense for the entire duration of the show, finally get to be relaxed.

"Well if I had one that counted the number of hours since my last neurotic thought, I would be at like, a hundred."

They gather bamboo to make repairs for the beds at camp, when Leah realises something. They can make instruments out of the bamboo.

Multiple hours of practice later, they arrive back at camp, proudly holding their crudely-but-lovingly-made instruments.

They play Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. It's a little off-key ("She's flat, but fuck me.") but the heart is there, and soon everyone is singing along.

Martha is dancing, Rachel and Dot are singing their hearts out, and Toni and Shelby are busy making googly eyes at one another.

And Leah?

Well, she makes her way over to Fatin.

She sings, "Home is whenever I'm with you," while cradling Fatin's face in her hands. Fatin melts, understanding the message, and falling even further in love.

In a tumultuous, traumatic time of their lives, filled with misery, guilt, shame, fear, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and bone-deep exhaustion they'll probably never fully recover from, this one simple gesture says everything.

I heard all you said. I felt your teeth tear my weary flesh. I bled from your wounds, but that's over now. I understand why.

I forgive you.

[mariacallous]

If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel’s more successful prime ministers.

He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its founding in 1948. The country enjoyed relative security, with no major wars or prolonged Intifadas. The period was one of uninterrupted economic growth and prosperity. Thanks to its early adoption of widespread vaccination, Israel was one of the first countries in the world to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. And toward the end of that span came three agreements establishing diplomatic relations with Arab countries; more were likely on the way.

Twelve years of Netanyahu’s leadership had seemingly made Israel more secure and prosperous, with deep trade and defense ties across the world. But this wasn’t enough to win him another term. A majority of Israelis had tired of him, and he had been tainted by charges of bribery and fraud in his dealings with billionaires and press barons. In the space of 24 months, Israel held four elections ending in stalemate, with neither Netanyahu nor his rivals winning a majority. Finally, an unlikely alliance of right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and Islamist parties managed to band together and replace him with his former aide Naftali Bennett in June 2021.

At that point, Netanyahu could have sealed his legacy. A plea bargain on offer from the attorney general would have ended his corruption trial with a conviction on reduced charges and no jail time. He would have had to leave politics, probably for good. Over the course of four decades in public life, including 15 years as prime minister and 22 as the Likud party’s leader, he had already left an indelible mark on Israel, dominating the second half of its history. But he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up power.

Within 18 months, he was back as prime minister for the third time. The unwieldy coalition that replaced him had imploded, and this time around, Netanyahu’s camp of far-right and religious parties ran a disciplined campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of their divided rivals to emerge with a small parliamentary majority, despite still being virtually tied in the vote count.

Nine months later, Netanyahu, the man who promised, above everything else, to deliver security for Israel’s citizens, presided over the darkest day in his country’s existence. A total breakdown of the Israeli military and intelligence structure allowed Hamas to breach Israel’s border and embark on a rampage of murder, kidnapping, and rape, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostage. The calamities of that day, the failures of leadership leading up to it, and the traumas it caused will haunt Israel for generations. Even leaving completely aside the war he has prosecuted since that day and its yet-unknown end, October 7 means that Netanyahu will always be remembered as Israel’s worst-ever leader.

How does one measure a prime minister?

There is no broadly accepted ranking of the 13 men and one woman who have led Israel, but most lists would feature David Ben-Gurion at the top. Not only was he the George Washington of the Jewish state, proclaiming its independence just three years after a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but his administration established many of the institutions and policies that define Israel to this day. Other favorites include Levi Eshkol, for his shrewd and prudent leadership in the tense weeks before the Six Day War, and Menachem Begin, for achieving the country’s first peace agreement with an Arab nation, Egypt.

All three of these men had mixed records and detractors, of course. Ben-Gurion had autocratic tendencies and was consumed by party infighting during his later years in office. After the Six Day War, Eshkol failed to deliver a coherent plan for what Israel should do with the new territories it occupied and the Palestinians who have remained under its rule ever since. In Begin’s second term, Israel entered a disastrous war in Lebanon, and his government nearly tanked the economy. But in most Israelis’ minds, these leaders’ positive legacies outweigh the negatives.

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. Before the war, she rejected Egyptian overtures toward peace (though some Israeli historians have recently argued that these were less than sincere). And when war was clearly imminent, her administration refrained from launching preemptive attacks that could have saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

Other “worst” candidates have included Ehud Olmert, for launching the second Lebanon war and becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to go to prison for corruption; Yitzhak Shamir, for kiboshing an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein that many believe could have been a significant step toward resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and Ehud Barak, for spectacularly failing to fulfill his extravagant promises to bring peace with both the Palestinians and Syria.

But Benjamin Netanyahu now surpasses these contenders by orders of magnitude. He has brought far-right extremists into the mainstream of government and made himself, and the country, beholden to them. His corruption is flamboyant. And he has made terrible security decisions that brought existential danger to the country he pledged to lead and protect. Above all, his selfishness is without parallel: He has put his own interests ahead of Israel’s at every turn.

Netanyahu has the distinction of being the only Israeli prime minister to make a once reviled movement on the right fringe of the country’s politics into a government stakeholder.

Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a Jewish-supremacist group called Kach, won a lone seat in the Knesset in 1984. He openly called for replacing Israeli democracy with a constitution based on the laws of the Torah and for denying Israel’s Arab citizens equal rights. During Kahane’s single legislative term, the entire Israeli political establishment shunned him. When he got up to speak in the Knesset, all of its members would leave the plenum.

In 1985, Likud joined other parties in changing election law so that those who denied Israel’s democratic identity, denied its Jewish identity, or incited racism could be barred from running for office. Under this provision, Kach was never allowed to compete in another election. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. Four years later, a member of his movement killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron, and the Israeli government proscribed Kach as a terror organization and forced it to disband.

But the Kahanists didn’t go away. With each Israeli election, they tried to rename their movement and adjust its platform to conform with electoral law. They remained ostracized. Then, in 2019, Netanyahu saw a roadblock on his path to reelection that they could help him get around.

Several Israeli parties had pledged not to serve in a government led by an indicted prime minister—quite possibly, enough of them to shut Netanyahu out of power. To prevent that from happening, Netanyahu needed to eke out every possible right-wing and religious vote for his potential coalition. The polls were predicting that the latest Kahanist iteration, the Jewish Power party, which is led by the thuggish but media-savvy Itamar Ben-Gvir, would receive only about 10,000 votes, well below the threshold needed to make the party a player on its own; but Netanyahu believed that if he could persuade the Kahanists and other small right-wing parties to merge their candidates’ lists into a joint slate, together they could win a seat or two for his potential coalition—just what he needed for a majority.

Netanyahu began pressuring the leaders of the small right-wing parties to merge their lists. At first the larger of these were outraged. Netanyahu was meddling in their affairs and, worse, trying to coerce them to accept the Kahanist outcasts. Gradually, he wore down their resistance—employing rabbis to persuade politicians, orchestrating media campaigns in the nationalist press, and promising central roles in future administrations. Media figures close to Netanyahu accused Bezalel Smotrich, a fundamentalist settler and the new leader of the religious Zionist party, of “endangering” the nation by making it easier for the hated left to win the election. Soon enough, Smotrich’s old-school national-religious party merged not only with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power but with an even more obscure, proudly homophobic party led by Avi Maoz.

Netanyahu did worry a bit about the optics. Throughout five stalemated election campaigns from 2019 to 2022, Likud coordinated closely with Jewish Power, but Netanyahu refused to be seen in public with Ben-Gvir. During the 2022 campaign, at a religious festival, he even waited backstage for Ben-Gvir to leave the premises before going up to make his speech.

Two weeks later, there was no longer any need to keep up the act. Netanyahu’s strategy succeeded: His coalition, merged into four lists, edged out its squabbling opponents with 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Netanyahu finally had the “right-wing in full” government he had often promised. But before he could return to the prime minister’s office, his allies demanded a division of the spoils. The ministries with the most influence on Israelis’ daily lives—health, housing, social services, and the interior—went to the ultra-Orthodox parties. Smotrich became finance minister; Maoz was appointed deputy minister in charge of a new “Agency for Jewish Identity,” with power to intervene in educational programs. And Ben-Gvir, the subject of numerous police investigations for violence and incitement over a period of three decades, was put in charge of a newly titled “Ministry of National Security,” with authority over Israel’s police and prison services.

As Netanyahu signed away power to the Kahanists, he told the international news media that he wasn’t forming a far-right government. The Kahanists were joining his government. He would be in control. But Netanyahu hadn’t just given Israel’s most extreme racists unprecedented power and legitimacy. He’d also insinuated them into his own formerly mainstream party: By March 2024, Likud’s candidates for local elections in a handful of towns had merged their slates with those of Jewish Power.

Likud long prided itself on combining staunch Jewish nationalism, even militarism, with a commitment to liberal democracy. But a more radical stream within the party eschewed those liberal values and championed chauvinistic and autocratic positions. For much of the past century, the liberal wing was dominant and provided most of the party’s leadership. Netanyahu himself espoused the values of the liberal wing—until he fell out with all the main liberal figures. By 2019, none was left to oppose the alliance with Ben-Gvir’s Kahanists.

Now more than a third of Likud’s representatives were religious, and those who weren’t preferred to call themselves “traditional” rather than secular. They didn’t object to cooperating with the Kahanists; indeed, many had already worked with them in the past. In fact, many Likud Knesset members by that point were indistinguishable from the Jewish Power ones. Israel’s worst prime minister didn’t just form an alliance of convenience with the country’s most irresponsible extremists; he made them integral to his party and the running of the state.

That Netanyahu is personally corrupt is not altogether novel in the history of the Israeli prime ministership. What makes him worse than others is his open contempt for the rule of law.

By 2018, Netanyahu was the subject of four simultaneous corruption investigations that had been in motion for more than a year. In one, known as Case 4000, Netanyahu stood accused of promising regulatory favors to the owner of Israel’s largest telecom corporation in return for favorable coverage on a popular news site. Three of the prime minister’s closest advisers had agreed to testify against him.

Investigations of prime ministers are not rare in Israel. Netanyahu was the subject of one during his first term. The three prime ministers who served in the decade between his first and second terms—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert—had all been investigated as well. Only in Olmert’s case did police deem the evidence sufficient to mount a prosecution. At the time, in 2008, Netanyahu was the leader of the opposition.

“We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations and has no public or moral mandate to make fateful decisions for Israel,” Netanyahu said of Olmert. “There is a concern, I have to say real, not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest of political survival and not on the national interest.”

Ten years later, Netanyahu would be the one snared in multiple investigations. Then he no longer spoke of corruption in high office but of a “witch hunt,” orchestrated by rogue police commanders and left-wing state prosecutors, and egged on by a hostile news media, all with the aim of toppling a right-wing leader.

Netanyahu was determined to politicize the legal procedure and pit his supporters against Israel’s law-enforcement agencies and judiciary. Never mind that the two previous prime ministers who had resigned because of corruption charges were from the center left. Nor did it matter that he had appointed the police commissioner and attorney general himself; both were deeply religious men with impeccable nationalist backgrounds, but he tarred them as perfidious tools of leftist conspiracy.

Rather than contemplate resignation, on May 24, 2020, Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister to go on trial. He has denied all wrongdoing (the trial is still under way). In a courthouse corridor before one session, he gave a 15-minute televised speech accusing the legal establishment of “trying to topple me and the right-wing government. For over a decade, the left wing have failed to do this at the ballot box, and in recent years have come up with a new idea. Elements in the police and prosecutor’s office have joined left-wing journalists to concoct delusional charges.”

The law didn’t require Netanyahu to resign while fighting the charges against him in court. But doing so had seemed logical to his predecessors under similar circumstances—and to Israel’s lawmakers, who had never envisaged that a prime minister would so brazenly challenge the justice system, which he had a duty to uphold. For Netanyahu, however, remaining in power was an end in itself, one more important than preserving Israel’s most crucial institutions, to say nothing of Israelis’ trust in them.

Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power. Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel’s judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel’s worst prime minister.

For 34 of the past 47 years, Israel’s prime ministers have come from the Likud party. And yet many on the right still grumble that “Likud doesn’t know how to rule” and “you vote right and get left.” Likudniks complain about the lingering power of “the elites,” a left-wing minority that loses at the ballot box but still controls the civil service, the upper echelons of the security establishment, the universities, and the media. A growing anti-judicial wing within Likud demands constitutional change and a clamping-down on the supreme court’s “judicial activism.”

Netanyahu had once minimized these complaints, but his stance on the judiciary changed after he was indicted in 2019. Indeed, at the start of his current term, Likud’s partners demanded commitments to constitutional change, which they received. The ultra-Orthodox parties were anxious to pass a law exempting religious seminary students from military service. Such exemptions had already fallen afoul of the supreme court’s equality standards, so the religious parties wanted the law to include a “court bypass.” Netanyahu acceded to this. To pass the legislation in the Knesset, he appointed Simcha Rothman, a staunch critic of the court, as the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee.

He also appointed Yariv Levin, another fierce critic of the court, as justice minister. Just six days after the new government was sworn in, Levin rolled out a “judicial reform” plan, prepared by a conservative think tank, that called for drastically limiting the court’s powers to review legislation and gave politicians control over the appointment of new justices.

Within days, an extremely efficient counter-campaign pointed out the dangers the plan posed, not just to Israel’s fragile and limited democracy, but to its economy and security. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested in the streets. Likud began to drop in the polls, and Netanyahu privately urged the leaders of the coalition parties to delay the vote. They refused to back down, and Levin threatened to resign over any delay.

Netanyahu’s motives, unlike those of his partners, were not ideological. His objective was political survival. He needed to keep his hard-won majority intact and the judges off-balance. But the protests were unrelenting. Netanyahu’s independent-minded defense minister, Yoav Gallant, pointed to the controversy’s dire implications for the Israel Defense Forces as hundreds of volunteer reserve officers threatened to suspend their service rather than “serve a dictatorship.”

Netanyahu wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the judicial coup, but the idea of one of Likud’s senior ministers breaking ranks in public was unthinkable. On March 25 of last year, Gallant made a public statement that the constitutional legislation was a “clear and major threat to the security of Israel” and he would not be voting for it. The next evening, Netanyahu announced that he was firing Gallant.

In Jerusalem, protesters besieged Netanyahu’s home. In Tel Aviv, they blocked main highways. The next morning, the trade unions announced a general strike, and by that evening, Netanyahu backed down, announcing that he was suspending the legislation and would hold talks with the opposition on finding compromises. Gallant kept his post. The talks collapsed, protests started up again, and Netanyahu once again refused to listen to the warnings coming from the security establishment—not only of anger within the IDF, but that Israel’s enemies were planning to take advantage of the country’s disunity to launch an attack.

The debate over judicial reform pitted two visions of Israel against each other. On one side was a liberal and secular Israel that relied on the supreme court to defend its democratic values; on the other, a religious and conservative Israel that feared that unelected judges would impose incompatible ideas on their Jewish values.

Netanyahu’s government made no attempt to reconcile these two visions. The prime minister had spent too many years, and all those toxic electoral campaigns, exploiting and deepening the rift between them. Even when he belatedly and halfheartedly tried to rein in the radical and fundamentalist demons he had ridden back into office, he found that he could no longer control them.

Whether Netanyahu really meant to eviscerate Israel’s supreme court as part of a plot to weaken the judiciary and intimidate the judges in his own case, or whether he had no choice in the matter and was simply a hostage of his own coalition, is immaterial. What matters is that he appointed Levin as justice minister and permitted the crisis to happen. Ultimately, and despite his professed belief in liberal democracy, Netanyahu allowed Levin and his coalition partners to convince him that they were doing the right thing—because whatever kept him in office was right for Israel. Democracy would remain strong because he would remain in charge.

Trying to diminish the powers of the supreme court isn’t what makes Netanyahu Israel’s worst prime minister. The judicial reform failed anyway. Only one of its elements got through the Knesset before the war with Hamas began, and the court struck it down as unconstitutional six months later. The justices’ ruling to preserve their powers, despite the Knesset’s voting to limit them, could have caused a constitutional crisis if it had happened in peacetime. But by then Israel was facing a much bigger crisis.

Given Israel’s history, the ultimate yardstick of its leaders’ success is the security they deliver for their fellow citizens. In 2017, as I was finishing my unauthorized biography of Netanyahu, I commissioned a data analyst to calculate the average annual casualty rate (Israeli civilians and soldiers) of each prime minister since 1948. The results confirmed what I had already assumed. In the 11 years that Netanyahu had by then been prime minister, the average annual number of Israelis killed in war and terror attacks was lower, by a considerable margin, than under any previous prime minister.

My book on Netanyahu was not admiring. But I felt that it was only fair to include that data point in his favor in the epilogue and the very last footnote. Likud went on to use it in its 2019 campaigns without attributing the source.

The numbers were hard to argue with. Netanyahu was a hard-line prime minister who had done everything in his power to derail the Oslo peace process and prevent any move toward compromise with the Palestinians. Throughout much of his career, he encouraged military action by the West, first against Iraq after 9/11, and then against Iran. But in his years as prime minister, he balked at initiating or being dragged into wars of his own. His risk aversion and preference for covert operations or air strikes rather than ground operations had, in his first two stretches in power, from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021, kept Israelis relatively safe.

Netanyahu supporters on the right could also argue, on basis of the numbers, that those who brought bloodshed upon Israel, in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks, were actually Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, with his rash attempts to bring peace; and Ariel Sharon, who withdrew Israeli soldiers and settlers unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, creating the conditions for Hamas’s electoral victory there the following year. That argument no longer holds.

If future biographers of Israeli prime ministers undertake a similar analysis, Netanyahu will no longer be able to claim the lowest casualty rate. His 16th year in office, 2023, was the third-bloodiest in Israel’s history, surpassed only by 1948 and 1973, Israel’s first year of independence and the year of the Yom Kippur War, respectively.

The first nine months of 2023 had already seen a rise in deadly violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as terrorist attacks within Israel’s borders. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7, in which at least 1,145 Israelis were massacred and 253 kidnapped and taken to Gaza. More than 30 hostages are now confirmed dead.

No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu’s term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security.

To understand how Netanyahu so drastically failed Israel’s security requires going back at least to 2015, the year his long-term strategic bungling of the Iranian threat came into view. His mishandling didn’t happen in isolation; it is also related to the deprioritization of other threats, including the catastrophe that materialized on October 7.

Netanyahu flew to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to implore U.S. lawmakers to obstruct President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Many view this gambit as extraordinarily damaging to Israel’s most crucial alliance—the relationship with the United States is the very bulwark of its security. Perhaps so; but the stunt didn’t make subsequent U.S. administrations less supportive of Israel. Even Obama would still go on to sign the largest 10-year package of military aid to Israel the year after Netanyahu’s speech. Rather, the damage Netanyahu caused by presuming too much of the United States wasn’t to the relationship, but to Israel itself.

Netanyahu’s strategy regarding Iran was based on his assumption that America would one day launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. We know this from his 2022 book, Bibi: My Story, in which he admits to arguing repeatedly with Obama “for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Senior Israeli officials have confirmed that he expected Donald Trump to launch such a strike as well. In fact, Netanyahu was so sure that Trump, unlike Obama, would give the order that he had no strategy in place for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program when Trump decided, at Netanyahu’s own urging, to withdraw from the Iran deal in May 2018.

Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs had been far from enamored with the Iran deal, but they’d seized the opportunity it presented to divert some of the intelligence resources that had been focused on Iran’s nuclear program to other threats, particularly Tehran’s network of proxies across the region. They were caught by surprise when the Trump administration ditched the Iran deal (Netanyahu knew it was coming but didn’t inform them). This unilateral withdrawal effectively removed the limitations on Iran’s nuclear development and required an abrupt reversal of Israeli priorities.

Senior Israeli officials I spoke with had to tread a wary path here. Those who were still in active service couldn’t challenge the prime minister’s strategy directly. But in private some were scathing about the lack of a coherent strategy on Iran. “It takes years to build intelligence capabilities. You can’t just change target priorities overnight,” one told me.

The result was a dissipation of Israeli efforts to stop Iran—which is committed to the destruction of Israel. Iran sped further than ever down the path of uranium enrichment, and its proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, grew ever more powerful.

In the months leading up to October 7, Israel’s intelligence community repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Iran and its proxies were plotting a major attack within Israel, though few envisaged something on the scale of October 7. By the fall of 2023, motives were legion: fear that an imminent Israeli diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia could change the geopolitics of the region; threats that Ben-Gvir would allow Jews greater access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners; rumors that the deepening tensions within Israeli society would render any response to an attack slow and disjointed.

Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings. The senior officers and intelligence chiefs who issued them were, to his mind, conspiring with the law-enforcement agencies and legal establishment that had put him on trial and were trying to obstruct his government’s legislation. None of them had his experience and knowledge of the real threats facing Israel. Hadn’t he been right in the past when he’d refused to listen to leftist officials and so-called experts?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was the result of a colossal failure at all levels of Israel’s security and intelligence community. They had all seen the warning signals but continued to believe that the main threat came from Hezbollah, the larger and far better-equipped and trained enemy to the north. Israel’s security establishment believed that Hamas was isolated in Gaza, and that it and the other Palestinian organizations had been effectively deterred from attacking Israel.

Netanyahu was the originator of this assumption, and its biggest proponent. He believed that keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, as it had been for nearly two years when he returned to office in 2009, was in Israel’s interest. Periodic rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south were a price worth paying to keep the Palestinian movement split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank enclaves and Hamas in Gaza. Such division would push the troublesome two-state solution off the global agenda and allow Israel to focus on regional alliances with like-minded Arab autocracies that also feared Iran. The Palestinian issue would sink into irrelevance.

Netanyahu’s disastrous strategy regarding Gaza and Hamas is part of what makes him Israel’s worst prime minister, but it’s not the only factor. Previous Israeli prime ministers, too, blundered into bloody wars on the basis of misguided strategies and faulty advice from their military and intelligence advisers.

Netanyahu stands out from them for his refusal to accept responsibility, and for his political machinations and smear campaigns since October 7. He blames IDF generals and nourishes the conspiracy theory that they, in alliance with the protest movement, somehow allowed October 7 to happen.

Netanyahu believes that he is the ultimate victim of that tragic day. Convinced by his own campaign slogans, he argues that he is the only one who can deliver Israel from this valley of shadows to the sunlit uplands of “total victory.” He refuses to consider any advice about ending the war and continues to prioritize preserving his coalition, because he appears incapable of distinguishing between his own fate, now tainted by tragic failure, and that of Israel.

Many around the world assume that Israel’s war with Hamas has proceeded according to some plan of Netanyahu’s. This is a mistake. Netanyahu has the last word as prime minister and head of the emergency war cabinet, but he has used his power mainly to prevaricate, procrastinate, and obstruct. He delayed the initial ground offensive into Gaza, hesitated for weeks over the first truce and hostage-release agreement in November, and is now doing the same over another such deal with Hamas. For the past six months, he has prevented any meaningful cabinet discussion of Israel’s strategic goals. He has rejected the proposals of his own security establishment and the Biden administration. He presented vague principles for “the day after Hamas” to the cabinet only in late February, and they have yet to be debated.

However one views the war in Gaza—as a justified war of defense in which Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties it has cynically hidden behind, or as an intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, or as anything in between—none of it is Netanyahu’s plan. That’s because Netanyahu has no plan for Gaza, only one for remaining in power. His obstructionism, his showdowns with generals, his confrontations with the Biden administration—all are focused on that end, which means preserving his far-right coalition and playing to his hard-core nationalist base.

Meanwhile, he’s doing what he has always done: wearing down and discrediting his political opponents in the hope of proving to an exhausted and traumatized public that he’s the only alternative. So far, he’s failing. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone. But Netanyahu is fending off calls to hold an early election until he believes he is within striking distance of winning.

Netanyahu’s ambition has consumed both him and Israel. To regain and remain in office, he has sacrificed his own authority and parceled out power to the most extreme politicians. Since his reelection in 2022, Netanyahu is no longer the center of power but a vacuum, a black hole that has engulfed all of Israel’s political energy. His weakness has given the far right and religious fundamentalists extraordinary control over Israel’s affairs, while other segments of the population are left to pursue the never-ending quest to end his reign.

One man’s pursuit of power has diverted Israel from confronting its most urgent priorities: the threat from Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the desire to nurture a Westernized society and economy in the most contested corner of the Middle East, the internal contradictions between democracy and religion, the clash between tribal phobias and high-tech hopes. Netanyahu’s obsession with his own destiny as Israel’s protector has caused his country grievous damage.

Most Israelis already realize that Netanyahu is the worst of the 14 prime ministers their country has had in its 76 years of independence. But in the future, Jews might even remember him as the leader who inflicted the most harm on his people since the squabbling Hasmonean kings brought civil war and Roman occupation to Judea nearly 21 centuries ago. As long as he remains in power, he could yet surpass them.

[heliopauseentertainments]

In Memoriam

Part of MegOp Week 2024 Prompt - Day 7: Vulnerability/Acceptance

Continuity: IDW1

Rating: Teen

Relationships: Megatron & Optimus Prime

Characters: Megatron

Warnings: Vignette, Referenced Character Death, Grief, Mourning, Swearing

Summary: In which before being taken to have his sentence carried out, Megatron is granted a final request.

Crossposting: AO3 | Dreamwidth

Fic under cut. See AO3 for complete notes.

It had taken some finagling, but Ultra Magnus had gotten the Galactic Council to grant Megatron a final wish before he would be rendered insensate in isolation.

It might as well have been death; it was functionally death.

But he had been allowed this one indulgence. Even Prowl, in a rare display of mercy, had been in agreement that Megatron could have this.

It wasn’t the exact place that Optimus had met his end, but the Earth, a planet so fateful to their kind, was the closest solid ground Megatron could get to. Of course, the various governments of Earth had been against his visit, no matter how brief. However, on the condition that he was disarmed and squarely in the sights of more guns than could be considered reasonable, even the humans had allowed him to come to their world one last time.

Standing now in front of a monument erected in a joint effort by some of the few survivors of their species and the humans that did not detest all Cybertronians, Megatron could say farewell to his friend. In a strange way, they had been friends.

Ultra Magnus stood several paces away, having been allowed to accompany his “client” on this little journey. He kept his back respectfully turned, giving Megatron the dignity of a veneer of privacy, even if none of the soldiers ready to fire upon him could give him the same courtesy.

The monument, a large, polished white marble stele with the same dedication engraved in multiple languages. Neocybex, of course, but the remainder were several of Earth’s languages. His universal translator was able to decipher most of them in a sort of flat way, but he was sure much nuance was being lost.

“In memoriam of Optimus Prime of Iacon—“ Incorrect, Primes traditionally lost their city names upon ascension. “—our friend from the far off planet of Cybertron—“ No longer extant. “—who selflessly sacrificed himself—“ As he had been wont to do his entire life, yes. “—to protect Earth from destruction.”

An etching of Optimus’s face, in partial profile, had been placed in the center of the slab, surrounded in scrollwork and geometric shapes, a fusion of typical Iaconian styles with the more organic aesthetic of Optimus’s favorite mudball world—Megatron oughtn’t call it that.

Knowing that Optimus was dead and seeing the purported proof were vastly different things. An icy weight, a grief he had not borne since he had believed Terminus dead, tugged inward on his spark, compressing it until it seemed like it might implode.

In the grooves of the carved glyphs and artwork, Megatron could see traces of color, as though the monument had been the victim of graffiti. Forcibly bringing a previously sovereign world into consortium with alien governments tended to not be popular. Megatron ought to know, after all.

For all of the love and admiration and worship foisted upon Optimus, there would, of course, be those who wholeheartedly disagreed. Megatron could hardly blame them.

At least Optimus had had the luxury of actually dying.

Lucky bastard.

Megatron was to be punished with an endless undeath. Alone forever with his thoughts whenever the drive they would hook his spark up to would fluctuate, interrupting his senseless, slumbering void.

He reached out with his hands, his wrists awkwardly cuffed together. He could have broken the cuffs easily, but there was no need. It wouldn’t change anything.

Placing his palm on the etching of Optimus’s face, he smiled. A warm pressure bloomed in his spark, pushing through the cold grief.

“You finally did it, you foolish hero, you finally did it.”

There was a heavy sigh as he brushed his palm over the ridges in the marble.

“And, like usual, you didn’t bother to wait for me.”

[mitchellcoolboy123]

so, with 6 races left there's a bunch of speculation about the championship and who wins. in all honesty, i still think max verstappen has it in the bag!

first of all, points don't lie. lando hasn't been able to gain all that much ground on max despite having the superior car while red bull is actively imploding on itself. i think since miami (?) max and lando both gained the same amount of points, which is crazy considering everything. this just proves that *max* makes the difference, not the car. you can have the fastest car but the fastest car wont get you the championship.

secondly, lando really just does not have the experience and maturity to keep cool under pressure like max does. in critical moments, lando seems to make mistakes and falter while max rarely does. singapore is a prime example of this. all throughout the race, max had pressure from mclaren and mercedes behind him but still managed to run a consistent 1:36 lap the entire race. lando was sitting pretty up front with a 20+ second gap yet he almost hit the wall three times... for what?

thirdly, mclaren really shot themselves in the foot with the "papaya rules" and "we have 2 number 1 drivers" rhetoric. i will say i prefer oscar piastri and if either mclaren drivers get a wdc i truly believe it will be oscar and not lando. this isnt the year for that though. anyways, mclaren has made such awful strategy calls that damaged both of their drivers and were basically handing points to other drivers at times. its honestly laughable at times. i know this has "changed" but its pretty clear that stella prefers piastri and brown prefers norris. there's a divide and that divide will show, no matter what the upper management says (or in other words, mark webber lmfao)

of course, there are other people still in play for the wdc (piastri, leclerc) and i can confidently say that red bull will most likely continue to fall in the constructors because of perez. i will be surprised if red bull manages to keep 2nd in the constructors with how consistent both sainz and leclerc are at scoring points. with the current way of how things are, i highly doubt lando norris will win the wdc but yeah, the constructors is theirs.

i will forza my ferrari for carlos sainz and his perpetual 5th place while backing max lol tu tu tu tu max verstappen

[tricitymonsters]

You’re bed rotting, watching trash tv. Whatre the bois (side babes too) doing while you binge reality tv? Are they watching with us? Some other hobby?

Mori - likely to get drawn in to the tv, will definitely want to rustle around under your blanket while you veg out even if you forbid him from getting Too Frisky. Mori usually multitasks so he might also do stuff on his phone or doodle on something at the same time if there’s any hope of him being chill for 10 minutes.

Amir - absolutely gets drawn into whatever you’re watching especially if there’s drama. Unfortunately he wants to talk through a lot of it to give his take and how to either make the drama worse or more entertaining. Might ignore his clients to continue giving you his trash tv hot takes.

Akello - This is a prime excuse to nap. He’s not super big into most tv but akello enjoys sharing the same space with you even if he’s not doing the same activity. If he’s not using the opportunity to catch up on sleep, Akello has a really hard time being idle so he may bring a book or or some work with him to stay productive.

Raath - Complaining that you’re not using your energy to pay attention to him. You’ll need to maybe embellish the context of whatever you’re watching to get him distracted by it. Or put on a slasher movie to get him more engaged and prone to sitting with you the whole time. Otherwise he’ll pop in and out a lot to make sure the “perimeter is safe” while you’re “weak and vulnerable”.

Kazu - Cannot relax. Will probably spend time working in his garage and come up to check on you / doordash food several times during the day. He’s a creature of ritual and schedules and he cannot deviate from his regiment without feeling like the world is imploding so it will take a crisis to get his full attention unfortunately. He will, however, text to check in with your current status often enough to let you know he cares.

Marcel - This is the perfect excuse for him to ALSO rot in bed and ignore his obligations in favor of trash tv. I like to think he watches a lot of that anyway so he might be just as well versed as you in the show.

[prismaticpichu]

In honor of it being Friday, what kind of stuff would Zack and Sephiroth get up to on Friday nights?

Yesss!!! The beans on Fridayyyyyyy! 💙💚 Excellent question!!!!

~

Zack’s Recorded List of Seph-i-Rocking Things He & Seph Have Done on Fridays!

• Movie Theater Theatrics - Aka, Zack really wanted his bud to experience an epic flick on the big screen, and so he took Sephiroth to the local Midgar cinema with the persuasion of popcorn and icees. What neither didn’t realize was that it was a local Silver Elite get together, that just so happened to be having their fun at the same exact showing time. This resulted in every seat of the auditorium being taken by a raging fanatic - four of whom tried to steal Seph’s popcorn to sell it, eight of whom tried to steal Seph’s icee straw, and 30 of whom tried to steal Zack’s seat to sit next to him. When one ended up spilling Zack’s candy amid the mayhem, Sephiroth proceeded to cast a mastered Sleep on the entire room (minus Zack). They then enjoyed the film in peace <3

• Laser Tag Tumult - Aka, Zack wanted his bud to experience the thrilling rush of adrenaline that was a game of lasar tag, and so he took Seph to the local laser attack arena for some fun. What neither didn’t realize was that it was that a birthday party for an eight year old had also been booked there at the same exact night. This resulted in Zack & Seph being put on separate teams, each armed with a platoon of vicious, cake-fueled third graders on their side. Only problem was that the kids on Zack’s side were so petrified to play against Sephiroth that they wouldn’t leave the safety spot of their home base. In a moment of quick and compassionate thinking, Zack got his little team into a huddle, proceeding to whisper to him all the adorable things he had seen Sephiroth do: fall asleep on the couch wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, slurping up ramen, and the way he gave the warmest and most loving hugs when you needed one. The squad was so touched and amused that they proceeded to storm Sephiroth’s team - and the game was ON - Zack’s little battalion intoning “General Squishy” all the while.

• Night Club Clatter - Aka, Zack wanted his bud to experience the classic weekend experience when he was in his prime, and so he took Seph to Midgar’s local night club - The Bombed Squad. Zack promised to never leave his friend’s side, sitting next to him at the bar as music exploded all around them, for one unbothered by swarming fanatics as Sephiroth had the foresight to dress up this time. But what couldn’t plague Seph with autograph requests and photos was instead replaced by the erupting music and flashing lights. He sat at the bar, shaking in his arms, enhanced hearing making everything all the more potent. Seeing this, Zack asked his friend if they wanted to leave, rubbing his pal’s back in a gesture of comfort. Seph said yes. HOWEVER—as they were about to dip, Sephiroth’s all-time favorite song came on, and the anxiety melted away into amusement and fun as Zack pulled him to the dance floor to have one of the best night of their lives. (It was also the first time Zack ever saw Seph get the least bit tipsy.)

• Bowling Bash - Aka, Zack wanted his bud to experience the thrill of sporty completion, and so he took a disguised Seph to the local bowling alley for some good-hearted rivalry. All was going well as they got their shoes and picked their lane, the establishment bustling with the perfect blend of energy and breathability. Zack decided to go first; he picked up a ball, raced across the lane, and bowled the thing with all his might. A clean 9/10! Zack cheered as he turned back to his clapping friend, playfully teasing for him to do better. Sephiroth happily accepted the challenge. Stepping up to the lane, his own shiny sphere in hand, he wound his arm back as the man prepared to bowl; aiming, focusing, releaSING—SMASSHHHHHH! And there went the bowling lane, gone in an instant, the floor having imploded from the sheer weight of the warrior’s alien-jacked strength. The rest of the night was spent at a local pizza parlors, hopping from one place to the next as they continued to run away from the manager. The duo couldn’t stop laughing when they returned home - the hardest Zack had ever seen his best friend laugh <3

• The Classic - Aka, Zack wanted his bud to do what he wanted to do one Friday night, and so the two SOLDIERs found themselves on Sephiroth’s couch amidst a peaceful and personal quiet. Nothing but talking; nothing but sharing stories, ordering in food, laughing, playing board games, and rocking at multiplayer video games Zack had long brought over from his apartment. He may have fun outside, but nothing really meant more to Sephiroth than being able to spend relaxing time with Zack <333

[jaggedjot]

"THERE CAN BE a huge range of reasons why a show in 2024—this one or any other—doesn’t have the reach it deserves; endless pixels have been spilled on streamer fatigue and fractured audiences in the past few years. AMC, a darling of the prestige-TV-on-cable era, is in an especially strange position: Even when Interview’s first season was a hit on its streaming service, AMC+, it was still held up as an example of a troubled industry in transition. Two years and two Hollywood strikes later, the situation is even more complicated. As the industry restructures and changes who can watch what where, a disconnect has emerged between what viewers like and what critics do. At the same time, social media platforms—the loci of 21st-century word of mouth—continue to implode, fracturing the conversation of an already dispersed audience. Amidst this, IWTV faces specific hurdles due to the nature of the show. An adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel that pulls heavily from the many Vampire Chronicles books that followed, the show racebends many of its leads—its titular vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac, is now Black—and goes all in on the queerness of the books. And it is, of course, about vampires—specifically, vampires who do terrible things. “IWTV has so much that a modern audience could want from a series but, unfortunately, some people won’t receive it solely because it’s a queer horror show with majority BIPOC leads,” says Bobbi Miller, a culture critic who recaps the show on her YouTube channel. “Genre TV is always going to have to jump through more hoops for success than a standard drama.” For the converted, the idea that more people aren’t watching Interview is maddening. One could certainly argue that the show, with its dark, twisted Gothicness and emotional maximalism, isn’t for everyone. But in an era of unceremonious cancellations—even of shows that execs touted as hits—and with an absence of information about the show’s future, it’s understandable that its most dedicated fans would be pushing for more viewers. Interview isn’t the only show whose fans question its marketing efforts; it’s a common accusation leveled at streamers of all sorts, especially when a show is canceled. But in this conversation, Interview fans pointed at specific decisions made by the network that many feel have made this season’s rollout feel so much more muted than the last. “It’s been a conversation that fans have been talking about for a while now, but I think what really set them off was the comment made by Film Updates,” says Rei Gorrei, a fan who dubs herself the “Unofficial Vampire Chronicles Spokesperson.” A pop-culture aggregation account with nearly a million followers, Film Updates revealed they had been denied interview requests with the show’s talent—and since fans were worried no one was hearing about IWTV, they couldn’t understand why that reach wasn’t being capitalized on. “I think the combination of these things along with little marketing leaves fans in a word-of-mouth scenario where we now feel like it’s up to us to campaign for the season three renewal,” Gorrei says. Many questioned the promotion the network had been implementing, too, like the decision to never have Anderson and Assad Zaman, whose characters’ romance is one of the main focuses of the season, interviewed together. Episode five in particular, with its explosive fight scene between the two, would have been a prime opportunity. (AMC did not respond to emails seeking comment for this story.) Other fans raised concerns about the unceremonious cancelation of the widely admired official podcast, whose Black female host, Naomi Ekperigin, felt like the perfect interviewer for a show with Black leads and nuanced racial storylines. Then there was the fact that too few episodes would air in time for Emmy consideration—not the fault of marketing, but yet one more source of fan worry."

Interview With the Vampire Fans Say the Stakes Have Never Been Higher by Elizabeth Minkel

[cakepoppresent]

Consider This an Early Retirement

The day is finally here. The dreaded shareholders meeting. Gideon is seated with the other members of the board. His father and grandfather are seated across from him looking smug and proud. It's only a matter of minutes. "We'll get things started"

Viktor: The most important part of this meeting is to discuss my grandson Gideon who is expected to be next in line. He will take over with the expectation that he marries Miss Wagner bringing both families together, which will benefit everyone's pockets

There is silence in the boardroom. The Wagner family is small but they have access to a lot of prime land in Windenburg. Being able to have access to those lands would lead to fatter wallets for everyone involved. Everyone has their own thoughts.

Viktor: If everyone agrees for Gideon to take over his father say aye so we can continue with the meeting.

Of the 6 people seated in the boardroom, only 1 voiced their agreement. Victor's jaw tenses in anger and glares at the remaining members whose silence infuriates Viktor

Viktor: What's the meaning of this? I thought we all want the same thing?

The silence is deafening, no one answers or looks directly at Victor there is nothing to say. They know what the real issue is. Viktor heart drops, something isn't right and he looks straight at Gideon.

Gideon stares right back at him, cold and confident. That little shit did something and Victor has no idea what is happening. Gideon finally speaks up

Gideon: I'm going to have to disagree. I'm not a pawn that can be used and what gives you the ability to make that decision?

Viktor: I'm your grandfather and a major shareholder of course I have the power to do what needs to be done

Gideon: I don't think that statement is accurate"

At that moment Ren steps in and places a file in front of Viktor. "According to that file, you don't have the majority of the shares"

Viktor: What are you talking about?? Our family built this company from the ground up. What did you do?"

Gideon stays silent and Ren sends out a message, in a moment Daisuke steps into the boardroom. Viktor eyes snap up to Daisuke and barks out "Who the hell are you?"

Gideon gets up from his seat and Daisuke takes over and adjusts his suit, once comfortable he addresses Viktor

Daisuke: If you read the file in front of you, my name is listed as a board member with the most shares

Viktor: What the hell did you say?

Daisuke: Ren please explain

Ren: Mr. Takahashi has accumulated the shares of Gideon, his mother and a few members of the board have also sold their shares to Mr. Takahashi. meaning he has a total of 52% of the shares, making him have controlling power

Viktor's head is buzzing, ears ringing "Gideon?"

Gideon: We don't have controlling power anymore, if we combine all the remaining shares in the Williams name it's nothing. Daisuke has a few changes he plans on making

Daisuke: Gideon is right, whatever merger with the Wanger family is dissolved. We won't be needing their assistance. Secondly, your obsession with your grandson's marriage partner along with your son's (Emerson) inability to make any impact makes me question if you still need your positions. With that being said my first suggestion would be to remove you and Mr. Emerson from your positions effectively immediately and Gideon will be your replacement. All in favour say please raise your hands"

The remaining members in the board room silently raise their hands

Daisuke: Perfect. I appreciate all the effort you have put into the company so far. I will make sure to take it even further. If anyone has any questions please direct them to Ren as we get everything in order. This meeting is over" Dasiuke adjusts his suit and leaves the meeting.

The boardroom is left in an awkward silence the Williams family imploded in such a quick and ruthless manner. There are no words of comfort or assurance for Emerson and Viktor, as everyone slowly leaves the meeting.

Viktor: Gideon you little shit, how dare you

Gideon: I made it clear to drop your obsession with my marriage. I told you if you keep pushing there will be consequences

Emerson: Is Grayson worth all this? You ruined us, what are we going to do now

Gideon: Mom and I will be fine. I hope you and Grandad can figure something out. Consider this an early retirement, maybe you can enjoy your final days in Tomorang.

Gideon leaves them alone in the boardroom still in shock about what happened. They were fired?

Previous - Next

[thecoolerliauditore]

For those of you uninitiated, Talon League of Legends was my prime blorbo from back when I was 14 and played League the most which is bad because Talon is not a good character. Well actually he's very good and his E is ridiculous but there are champs that essentially do what he does but better. No one plays Talon. I'm pretty sure Riot barely remembers they made Talon.

Enter Yamikaze, high elo Talon main and YouTuber. I watched Yami alot when he was at the height of his popularity because there is literally no one else who willingly plays Talon.

Yami is a good player. And identified Talons weakness that other assassins just assassinate better than him. So he introduced what was at the time a very radical concept: play Talon as a bruiser. Prioritise healing and tankiness over burst damage. Play to survive and out damage with your base stats in fights instead of sniping the squishies and then imploding on the spot.

Bruiser Talon was Good. And that was a problem for me, because I find bruiser Talon fucking boring as fuck. But whatever it got popular. It got really popular. Talon even saw proplay for the first time in years. Everyone played Talon and I hated it I hated it so much genuinely. YouTuber Yamikaze was right in that bruiser Talon was just objectively more viable but holyyyy fuck I wanted to put a hit out on him for what he singlehandedly did to Talons meta.

And to top it all off, Yami fucks off of the face of the planet. Actually I should be kinder here. Yami was playing on Korean servers at the time that are known for being notoriously toxic -- and that's by League of Legends standards. It was bad in there. And after a period of time where a bunch of his "rage clips" went viral he just vanished. And it SUCKED cus now I had to deal with my streamer being GONE and the Talon meta being in shambles. Like I can't even be mad at Yami cus Yami wasn't making shit anymore. His thumbnail artist (who is also the only Talon artist I know) even moved onto other characters.

Eventually as League goes everyone moved on from Talon as the meta shifted and I got to be a bit more comfortable again with my comfort pick, knowing that weird era of bruiser Talon was over at least, and hoping that Yami was doing well after quitting a game he clearly wasn't enjoying anymore (and really had nothing left to prove in)

Anyway it's been three years since Yami left.

Now look at what fucking turned up in my notifications yesterday

[blorbocedes]

Ferrari is going to imploded on each other and I'm going to sit with my sunglasses lean back and eat my popcorn as the two most "toxish" fanbases destroy each other (also think Ferrari would pick Lewis over Charles frfr)

i can see the reasoning to choose charles since he's been with their team longer and been primed for this moment, but you don't spend 100 mil on a driver who has won 7 championships for Nothing

[thirddeadlysin]

THIS!!! Can you imagine how SICK with worry Wayne has been?!!! He finds a body in his house, his boy is nowhere to be found and the subject of a manhunt, the town has freakin imploded, and NO ONE. NOT A SINGLE FACKIN SOUL THOUGHT “Hm. I bet Eddie’s uncle would want to know what really happened to him.”

COME ON!!!! WHAT THE FUCK GUYS!!!

Like, at the very least, Nancy would have told him. Nancy who spent so long trying to find Barb and eventually a way to tell her parents because she was absolutely tormented by their directionless grief? (Nancy whose first instinct on seeing Jonathan after Will's disappearance was to comfort him????) Nancy who sat with Wayne with an unsurprising amount of compassion directly after he found a gruesome scene and saw that his prime instinct in that conversation was to protect Eddie? Nancy didn't find a way to tell him???? Like, also Steve let Dustin do it alone?? After this 15 year old literally held his friend/hero as he died horribly in a hell dimension, no one is shielding Dustin from the next most gut-wrenching experience, one that seasoned medical staff have trouble with irl? None of the adults in the know or even the ones who think it was just an earthquake went to find Wayne? Where is Hopper?? Joyce???? Mods!!

Anyway that's why I'm glad Eddie isn't dead because how awful. *adjusts tinfoil hat*

[neitherabaron]

Another thing I’ve realised I like about the Muppets: the characters have aged.

Maybe not at the same pace as the performers (some of whom are still puppeteering them all these decades later!) but they’ve lived their lives together.

Kermit’s heavily implied to be in his late middle age from Muppets (2011) onwards. He’s so tired, all the time. Gonzo worries that his body can’t take the punishment it used to these days and that people will forget his stunt work (the 2015 sitcom). Fozzie struggles to find love as an older bear. Pepe secretly worries his prime is behind him and it’s too late for him to crack the Hollywood A-list scene. And Piggy, of course, is afraid she’s losing her looks.

But again, they’re struggling, but they struggle together. None of this brings them down for long because they have each other. They forget that sometimes, but always find their way back to each other.

People didn’t seem to like the definitely-not-for-kids 2015 sitcom, where the Muppets are all in midlife-crisis mode, hard-drinking, weirdly horny, kind of self-destructive and almost falling apart, but in some ways it’s the most wholesome and nuanced presentation of the characters.

Kermit and Piggy are going through a protracted divorce. Kermit’s seeing another pig, Piggy has a different beau on her arm every episode. At the same time they’re trying to produce a primetime chat show. Things are fraught and volatile and look like they might implode and rip this little showbiz family of Muppets apart. But Kermit and Piggy are lifelong friends and they eventually learn to put that friendship first and to support each other through the heartbreak of the end of their marriage.

They got old together, and while life may have killed their romance, it hasn’t killed their love.

[jechristine]

What do you make of zendaya being a recurring mention in doms blog. The one last week having this extract :

Not a great week for our new Prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer… His first big speech as the main man. The position most coveted by all UK politicians. The man in the chair, as it were. And with all eyes on him and expectations so high, he got things spectacularly wrong… When instead of referring to Israeli citizens captured on October 7th by Hamas terrorists as ‘hostages’, his brain imploded, and he called them ‘sausages’ instead – which he quickly corrected but too late - the damage had been done. Much ridicule ensued and I think a degree of faux outrage given the sensitivity of the subject, albeit it was clearly just an error and not deliberate. Of all the words in his speech to get wrong, but ‘hostages’ and of all the words to replace it with but ‘sausages’. Doh. It’s now gone viral of course in this internet age and no doubt, many of you will have seen it already. “We demand the return of the sausages…” A phrase which will haunt him forever more. But I have some sympathy for him because with 24-hour constant news reels and the reality that everyone with a phone is now a publisher, the spotlight on public figures has never been brighter. Nowadays, a single misguided utterance can become world news in an instant and why, my time on stage with a microphone has become more perilous than ever. At a recent gig, the client was keen that I open my show to questions from the floor and immediately I sighed…   Questions about my eldest son for sure, but nothing I hadn’t heard before and I can always parry if needs be. So, what can go wrong? Ever amendable, I agreed. Keep in mind that a Q & A session with me still needs to be funny. As a comedian, ‘funny’ is a given – a default – which brings added pressure. And why the first question was a challenge on all fronts… “Do you fancy Zendaya?” A question which puts me in a world of pain. A crass question which deserves short shrift, but lest we forget that I need to keep the room on-side – and entertained. Which is a feat to wrestle with anyway and all whilst worrying about whether I am being filmed or not. As I flounder for an adequate reply, my eyes scour the room for cameras and my thoughts are on the story that my answer might create and the accompanying click grabbing headline… Which is why back in the day, gigs were much more fun and dare-say-it, easier. When what happened in the room, stayed in the room. When everything was in context and sensitivities less acute and honed.

Who follows this dude’s blog besides Tom’s and Tomdaya’s fans?

So cringe, all of it

[xendiyatrix]

-TDU

-The Star Folk

-A long time ago the star folk landed on the primitive planet of earth and gave the gift of knowledge to man, being praised as angels and bringers of light. Eventually the Star Folk returned, during the Egyptian period. They gave enlightenment to Ferro Khufu who was to build great structures to house the Star Folks infinite knowledge in return for immortality. Upon completing this Khufu was met with nothing, until his death day when the father of the star folk rose from the ground and gave him the grand gift before he was buried inside the great pyramids. The Star Folk where never seen again and have since become myth via cave paintings and murals, but the Egyptian pyramids are believed by crazy conspiracy theorists to be bigger than they appear or are gateways to their plain of living or an anti reality.

-Dalek Trees/Skaro Lore

-upon the end of the Thal Kaled war in circa 1450 AD, the remaining daleks were left in their city with the thals being split and scattered across Skaro. The Dalek Prime, aka Andromeda, was left in charge and started construction on the new city of Kaalann.

Something in the dalek bloodline changed. Something from beyond the stars had hit and was intentionally designed to mess with the daleks genetic code. Davros who had been kept alive, turned the the new genetic alteration before it got worse into a drug, thinking of it as a positive for change he used it on himself. One day, his head imploded while in his lab and started to root into the city, the chair keeping him alive through it all. The outbreak started to pick off daleks one by one, their mutants exploding out of their casing and rooting into fungus like plants, before growing over time into rooted flesh trees of various sizes. Named Dalek Trees, these things had an eternal hunger and would consume anything that stepped near them, those that consumed the most would grow into large monoliths. These things are still alive and thinking, and once their seeds drop from their branches they uproot themselves and move to a new location. The only dalek to remain pure and evacuate the outbreak was the dalek prime.