@johnstodder
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Writer, PR, public policy persuader in SoCal. logos: The appeal to reason. pathos: The appeal to emotion. ethos: The persuasive appeal of one's character.
Southern California
Joined August 2007
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Trump and Musk will pull out all the stops to bury Joe Biden’s economic triumph, including arresting Biden and his top economic aides. But even against Musk’s corrupt spending, facts are stubborn things.
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
These sorts of analyses always miss the most salient point: at any time after starting the war with its brutal massacre, and Hamas could have ended it by releasing the hostages and surrendering.
Hamas, however, has no mercy or empathy for the people of Gaza, so it refused to do so even after it was abundantly clear that (a) it had lost militarily and (b) the war, and Hamas's strategy of fighting it within civilian infrastructure, was a catastrophe for Gaza's civilians.
So you're asking Israelis to show much more concern for Gaza's civilians than said civilians own government showed.
And to do so after many Gaza civilians participated in the atrocities of 10/7, cheered them afterwards, and participating in holding the hostages in captivity.
You are, in short, asking Israelis to be more saintly than any other people at war has ever been known to be.
I wonder if we went through The Economist's archives how much concern for the suffering of German civilians during World War II we'd find?
Did British troops facilitate massive aid to the German population during the war?
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
Today would have been John Coltrane’s hundredth birthday. In Sam Stephenson’s essay “An Absolute Truth: On Writing a Life of Coltrane,” published on our website in 2014, Stephenson spoke to Dr. Cuthbert Ormond Simpkins (“Tuffy, as he’s known to family and friends”), the author of Coltrane: A Biography. “After one night of thinking about the formulas I was deriving for my chemistry thesis, I woke up and declared to myself that I was going to write a book on Coltrane. I wanted to know who John Coltrane was. I wanted to know where his music came from.” Read the full piece on our website.
buff.ly/OfJLBE6
Probably what will happen. It took five years to fully recover from ACL surgery. Meanwhile Kawhi practices and strength-trains like a madman. He is a traumatized child who soothes his pain through relentless discipline & focus on his craft.
TOR might end up winning the trade.
The Toronto Raptors and Kawhi Leonard want to continue their reunion "into the 2030s," per @JakeLFischer on Bleacher Report.
Kawhi Leonard's $58.9M player option could be torn up so Leonard could extend with the franchise on a four-year deal.
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
All LOVE Clippers Nation
Thank you for those 6 years 🙏🏽
Congrats on retirement, Nico!
Thank you for all the memories during your time with #ClipperNation ❤️💙
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
Some “Free Palestine” activists ask me:
“Why don’t you stand with your Palestinian brothers and their aspirations?”
I answer:
“I do. I support their aspiration to live in dignity, prosperity, and peace side by side with Israel.”
Then they say (in Arabic):
“But we want to destroy Israel.”
And my answer is:
“Thank you for being clear. Then be equally clear when you speak on American campuses. Don’t present coexistence in English while advocating Israel’s destruction in Arabic.
I have seen the darkness of religious extremism with my own eyes. I once swallowed some of its narratives myself, and I fought my way out of that darkness.
So you expect someone like me, an Arab Muslim who has confronted radical Islamism to embrace a cause calling for another people’s destruction?
No, thank you.
I believe in God, and I have brains.
I stand by Israel’s right to exist. The prophets, kings, and heroes I grew up revering including figures revered in the Quran are inseparable from the history of that land and its peoples.
At the same time, I recognize Palestinian suffering and pain. It is real. Palestinians deserve dignity, security, prosperity, and a future for their children.
But that future cannot be built around destroying Israel. It requires leadership capable of taking Palestinians toward coexistence and a better future rather than sacrificing generation after generation to an endless conflict.
Two peoples can live. Two peoples can prosper. Neither needs to disappear for the other to have a future.”
And then comes the silence.
I have seen the darkness of hatred, and by the grace of God, I chose a different path.
It’s my life mission now.
Zero regrets.
All praise is due to God. 🙏🏼♥️
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
Motaz Azaiza is forcing a reckoning the “pro‑Palestine” movement never anticipated. Because he’s celebrated by activists, politicians, and journalists and can’t be smeared as a “Zionist shill,” his admission carries weight: Gaza’s journalism space functioned under Hamas’s control, and any reporter who deviated from the group’s narrative risked “disappearing behind the sun.” That single truth reshapes how we understand the stories pushed out of Gaza since October 7 and explains why dissent against Hamas’s rule never surfaced publicly. Western journalists and outsiders, unaware of this coercive ecosystem, ended up amplifying Hamas’s information warfare rather than scrutinizing it.
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
“America bad” messaging is really popular with a segment of the population that 1) are not reliable voters and 2) will probably grow out of that phase at some point.
I think most people come to understand that the world can’t be explained in strict binaries as they get older.
Can't wait for the "ackshully he's right" guys to come up with a rationalization for this rhetorical turd.
Some generous soul needs to send Piker tickets for a no-phones/no-internet six-month cruise to Antartica.
New clip: Hasan Piker says he believes the Middle East would be more stable if Iran had a nuclear weapon.
First aired on @TheLeadCNN w/ @jaketapper
Piker’s full answer:
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
Defund ICE. Take its budget and devote it to a Manhattan Project that can devise sound guardrails for AI, and figure out how to stop what can and should be stopped in the way of superintelligence and recursive self-improvement.
AI is far, far more dangerous than immigrants
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
There is absolutely no political purpose, potential gain, or relevance to treating Haley Stevens this way.
This does nothing to help establish a safe and sovereign Palestine. Which I and most people support.
This is just stalking, harassing, and threatening a woman.
They'll still tell themselves a little self-righteous moralistic fairytale about it, same as gamergaters saying they "just cared about ethics in games journalism", but be real. Everyone thinks they have a reason for anything they do.
Existentially, this is just what a hate movement is. Look at what they actually do. This amounts to harassment campaigns of Jewish people and their allies, especially women and Black people. The slogans are quickly becoming just an excuse for an outlet of hate as a hobby.
If you actually care about freeing Palestine, vote for candidates who limit arms sales (especially of 2000 lb bombs) and support a two-state solution. If you don't do that, your concerns are invalid. You're just a bigot who wants a permission slip.
The most creative punishment for Steve Ballmer, owner of the Clippers, would be to make him buy Paramount from that Ellison failson Trump toady, and keep all the Paramount jobs in California.
Paramount Skydance is actively looking for office space in Nashville.
It's a sign the company is seriously considering moving at least some operations from LA amid the legal fight over its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.
politico.com/news/2026/09/16…
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
I know we are projected to be bad this year but I don’t see it.
Clips infrastructure, ty lue, good players, there’s a competitive group here similar to other bridge year teams of year past. Looking forward to seeing how it plays out and excited to start the next era man
Toys R Us was profitable. Private equity bought it anyway, and 33,000 people lost their jobs with nothing.
In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought Toys R Us in a leveraged buyout for $6.6 billion.
Here's the part that gets skipped: the company itself was making money. It wasn't failing. It wasn't asking to be saved.
But in a leveraged buyout, the firms don't pay with their own money. They borrow against the company they're buying, and the debt becomes the company's problem, not theirs.
Toys R Us went from having almost no debt to carrying over $5 billion in loans it never asked for and never benefited from.
Every year after that, a huge share of the company's profit went straight to interest payments instead of stores, inventory, or staff. The stores got run down. Amazon and Walmart kept eating market share. Toys R Us couldn't invest its way out because there was nothing left after the debt.
In 2017 it filed for bankruptcy. In 2018 it liquidated completely.
33,000 employees lost their jobs. Store closures. No severance for most of them.
Giovanna De La Rosa worked there for years. She testified before Congress on November 19, 2019, describing what it meant to lose her income with nothing after decades of loyalty to a company that had been profitable the entire time she worked there.
The firms that bought it walked away having collected management fees for over a decade, regardless of outcome.
Here's the sentence that explains the entire model: the buyers cannot lose. The debt belongs to the company. The fees get collected either way.
They didn't buy a business to grow it.
They bought a business to extract from it, and left 33,000 people holding what was left.
John W Stodder Jr retweeted
When challenged, they claim they are only upset about illegal immigrants who are functionally foreign.
But then they see a photo of high-performing university students wearing cowboy hats and cheering a football team -- with the wrong skin color -- and they show us who they are.
Vice President Vance is a sociopath, laughing with sick freak Rudolph Giuliani at the 9/11 memorial. It’s a solemn occasion but they’re laughing? A new low for Vance.
Pink has responded to backlash after resharing an Instagram post criticizing Macklemore’s pro-Palestine performance at Ed Sheeran’s concert:
"I was born a Jew. I didn’t pick it, and I’ve never hidden it... Of course I don’t speak for Israel, or for any government. I never have. What I said in October 2023 is still exactly what I believe: Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations. Protecting innocent life comes first, everywhere, and nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child. Anybody’s child."
"Here’s what I was reacting to. I was in the room at the Grammys in 2014 when Macklemore rapped 'Same Love' and thirty-three couples, gay and straight, got married to it, and I cheered, no questions asked. Four months later Macklemore put on a hooked nose, a black beard and a bowl cut, performed in it, and called it a 'random costume.' Every Jew I know knew exactly what it was."
"Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them. You don’t get to decide that for us."
variety.com/2026/music/news/…
