Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
Mitzi Pepall
18.7K posts
Mitzi Pepall
@MitziPepall
Do not wake me. Do not follow me. https://t.co/NZQtjCXEfx https://t.co/l3QbbZeas6
Dublin/Venezia/Toronto Katılım Eylül 2022
251 Takip Edilen235 Takipçiler
Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
If the fate of the entire world is at stake you should at least be willing to use your name.
Restore The West 🇺🇸@voyagerstar10
@walterkirn The fate of the entire world is at stake. Now is the time for every single journalist with integrity to speak up. We cannot allow the zone to be flooded with Alien & Demon disinformation. Time is running out ⌛️
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Liberal party of Canada is bought and sold by bad actors. No principles other than staying in power. Canadians are so used to lies they no longer take notice. One word of truth would sound like a pistol shot. (Milosz)
Hillel Neuer@HillelNeuer
I don't understand why Canadian government reps keep saying “We don't support Iran for positions at the UN” as they keep supporting Iran for positions at the UN. 🧵
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Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
The fry-up has been quietly demoted, over the last forty years, from a daily British breakfast to a Saturday indulgence. A hangover meal. A guilty pleasure. The kind of thing you order in a Wetherspoons at half past eleven on a Sunday with a slightly apologetic look at the waitress, on the understanding that you will be having a salad for dinner to make up for it.
Your nutrition app flags it. Your doctor sighs at it. The newspaper runs an article every six months explaining that it will kill you.
This is one of the great practical jokes of modern British life.
The traditional Full English is one of the most nutritionally complete breakfasts a human being can sit down to.
Two eggs from a hen that scratched about in a back garden, eating grubs and kitchen scraps. Complete protein, choline, B12, vitamin D, the whole fat-soluble suite delivered in a yolk the colour of a marigold.
Two rashers of dry-cured back bacon from a Wiltshire pig. Stable saturated fat, B vitamins, selenium.
A pork sausage made that morning with three ingredients by the village butcher. A grilled tomato. Mushrooms cooked in the bacon fat. Black pudding for the iron. A slice of fried bread. A pot of tea strong enough to stand a teaspoon in.
This breakfast fuelled the men who dug the coal, laid the railways, fished the North Sea, and walked twelve miles a day delivering the post. Their cardiovascular disease rate was a fraction of ours. Their diabetes rate was a rounding error. Their obesity rate was zero.
Then sometime around 1985 we were told this breakfast was killing us. We were instructed, by people in offices, to switch to a bowl of corn flakes with skimmed milk. To a yoghurt with fourteen ingredients. To an oat milk latte. To a green smoothie containing more sugar than a can of Coke.
The cardiovascular disease rates climbed.
The diabetes rates climbed.
The obesity rates climbed.
The breakfast did not change. The advice did. The advice was wrong.
A plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and black pudding will outperform any breakfast designed by a wellness brand in a Shoreditch office. It costs less. It contains no seed oil. It has been keeping the British upright since the Iron Age.
Your grandfather did not feel guilty about his breakfast. He had bigger things to worry about.
So do you.
Eat it on a Tuesday. Without apologising.
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@ZwartblesIE Man, I thought I had a bad day. That is a lot to bear.
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Yesterday morning developed into a really truly shit day!!!
I just felt too emotional sick to upload this video till this morning.
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Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
Can’t believe this guy’s goal is to hoard a $10T net worth.
I would think with all that wealth, he would use it to help people more.
Like ending deaths in car accidents, or providing affordable transport for everyone, or offering internet to isolated people groups or something.
Watcher.Guru@WatcherGuru
JUST IN: Elon Musk says his goal is to reach a $10 trillion net worth. "$10T or bust"
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@toaster016 In brevity lies the soul of wit.
Although recently, posts have been as long as short stories.
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i have officially realized that twitter is a terrible place to actually try to have discussions with people. if you want to have an actual debate/convo then sure but twitter is a place for dunking on and being dunked upon. you cant express a nuanced point with 280 characters.
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A treatment for one of the worst cancers ?
Not sure what DCR means.
Comment if you can fill me in.
GB@OnlyGB
An Israeli company called Alpha Tau just announced over the weekend that their targeted alpha radiation therapy hit a DCR = 100% against Pancreatic Cancer. Score one for the good guys!!
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@MitziPepall @ryangrim It has not occurred to us dude.
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🧼 Kicked out of his suite for room service to come in.
👀 Waiting for me for his little routine. Look how he judges the step and knows the sounds to get around.
🍣 He even knows where the smoked salmon and poached chicken is.
A new bandana on and away we go 🙏
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@gothburz This story of quarantine at sea reminded me of you: Something about the closed loop.
x.com/ShortStopMedia…
Short Stop Media@ShortStopMedia
🚨 Nightmare at Sea A ship sits off the coast. A virus onboard. No port will take them. Trapped between disease and the law of the sea. A modern crisis with echoes of the past. Read the full story: Follow @ShortStopMedia for more Like • Repost • Share
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I am the Vice President of Franchise Lifecycle Management at Walt Disney Studios.
I have held this position for seven years, which means I have overseen four theatrical releases, six streaming series, two theme park expansions, and the conversion of a 47-year-old space opera into a subscription retention engine with an annual yield that exceeds the GDP of Belize.
I have a framed original 1977 Star Wars theatrical poster in my office on the third floor of the Frank G. Wells Building in Burbank. It is worth $14,200. I know this because Corporate Asset Management appraised it when we moved floors. It is classified as a Franchise Heritage Display under Internal Code FHD-1977-001. The insurance is paid quarterly.
May the 4th is not a holiday. It is a revenue event. Internally we call it Franchise Activation Window Q2-Alpha. I designed the current activation model in 2021 after we noticed a 340 percent spike in Disney+ engagement during the first 72 hours of May. The spike correlated with subscriber re-enrollment. People who had cancelled came back. For Star Wars. They stayed for the bundle, for the parks, for the merchandise pipeline that activates the moment a subscriber re-enrolls and does not deactivate until the credit card expires or the account holder does. Fans invented May the 4th in 1979. We own it now.
That's retention architecture.
George Lucas sold us the franchise in 2012 for $4.05 billion. At the time, Wall Street called it expensive. The slide I presented at last year's board review was titled "Return on Mythology." The room did not laugh. The room does not laugh at returns like that.
That's portfolio performance.
I manage a team of forty-three people. Six of them manage the Character Lifecycle Pipeline. It tracks every named character across all Star Wars properties and assigns each a Monetization Readiness Score from 1 to 100. Baby Yoda scored 97 before his first episode aired. We call him Asset GG-01 internally. Never Grogu in planning documents. We knew. The ears were right. The eyes were right. The price point was right. The merchandise tooling began fourteen months before the first trailer.
A plush Asset GG-01 generated nine figures in retail sales in its first fiscal year. I keep one on my bookshelf next to the poster. Visitors think it's charming. It is a case study. We do not retire characters. We sunset them into merchandise.
That's creative development.
Every planet in the Star Wars universe has a Theme Park Conversion Index. Tatooine scored 34. Too barren. Low ride density potential. Batuu scored 91. We invented Batuu. Galaxy's Edge cost $1 billion per installation. Two installations. We built a planet that never existed in any Star Wars film because the planets George Lucas created were not optimized for queue throughput and per-capita food-and-beverage spend.
Batuu has fourteen points of sale. Tatooine has sand.
That's experience design.
I attend a quarterly review called the Franchise Health Assessment. Twelve people in a room with a 74-inch monitor showing engagement curves, merchandise velocity, subscriber acquisition cost, and something we call the Nostalgia Decay Index. Proprietary. It measures how quickly audience attachment to a character diminishes without new content. The original trilogy characters decay at 3.2 percent per quarter without activation. Vader has never dropped below 94. We activate him annually. Death improves the numbers.
A character that stops generating content is a character that stops generating revenue. We do not let characters rest. We deploy them. The audience mourns the thing we killed. The audience pays to mourn it. The mourning is the product.
That's franchise stewardship.
At Star Wars Celebration last year a woman in the front row cried during the trailer reveal for the new series. Full tears. Hands over her mouth. My social media analyst was sitting three rows behind her. He sent me a Slack message during the standing ovation: "Organic engagement. Estimate 11-second dwell on reaction cam if we clip it." We clipped it. 2.3 million views on the official account. She does not know she is in our metrics deck. Slide 9. "Authentic Fan Response, Owned Channel Conversion." We did not ask permission. She was on our property.
A man at the same event was dressed as a handmade Boba Fett. Full armor. Told our brand ambassador he spent eight months building it. We photographed him for the official gallery. The legal department classifies cosplay at our events as "voluntarily contributed brand-adjacent content." The eight months he spent is earned media we did not pay for. His labor is our asset. He thinks he is expressing love. He is performing marketing.
That's community activation.
The audience that hates the new content still watches it. We track this. There is a metric called Negative Sentiment Engagement. It counts. A hate-watch is a watch. A rage-tweet is a tweet. A cancellation-threat viewer who returns the following season is a re-enrolled subscriber with a documented conversion event. The Franchise Health Assessment does not distinguish between love and anger. Both are dwell time.
That's audience retention.
The original trilogy was released between 1977 and 1983. Six years. Three films. Since the acquisition we have released five theatrical films, three animated series, seven live-action series, and assorted specials in twelve years. One of the analysts on my team calculated that we have produced more hours of Star Wars content in the last decade than existed in the franchise's entire history before we bought it.
I approved that statistic for the investor deck. Proudly. George Lucas made Star Wars at the speed of art. We make it at the speed of subscriber retention.
That's operational excellence.
Kathleen Kennedy has been president of Lucasfilm since the acquisition. Thirteen years. She has been called the destroyer of Star Wars on every platform that exists. YouTube. Reddit. Twitter. Podcasts I have never heard of with audiences larger than some of our series. More online petitions than any executive in entertainment history.
She is the best lightning rod money can buy.
Every show that disappoints. Every director we fire mid-production. Every sequel that underperforms. Every series that divides the audience into camps that hate each other more than they hate us. The anger goes to her. Not to the quarterly targets that required the content velocity. Not to the subscriber retention model that dictated the release cadence. Not to the Franchise Health Assessment that mandated six series in three years because the Nostalgia Decay Index said we had to. Not to me.
We fired Colin Trevorrow. Solo lost money. We fired Phil Lord and Chris Miller mid-shoot because they were making a film instead of a franchise installment, and the difference matters when your production pipeline has merchandise tooling deadlines that predate the final cut by nine months. We restructured three films during production. Each time, the internet burned her name. Not the system. Her.
I have watched her absorb sustained online hatred while the stock price held and the content pipeline delivered on schedule. I included this in a presentation once. I did not call it a sacrifice. I called it Brand Sentiment Redistribution. The room understood. She is not a scapegoat. Scapegoats are temporary. She is a load-bearing wall. She bears the weight so the architecture remains invisible.
We did not ruin Star Wars. We completed it.
That's leadership.
Toy sales declined 47 percent between 2016 and 2023. The merchandise team presented this at the quarterly review. Nobody used the word "decline." The slide was titled "Portfolio Diversification Across Experiential and Digital." Lightsaber sales were down. App revenue was up. The math balanced. We had converted physical play into digital engagement.
A child who once held a plastic lightsaber in their backyard now taps a screen to unlock one. The screen charges monthly. The backyard was free.
That's monetization evolution.
My daughter is seven. She has a Grogu backpack, a Princess Leia Halloween costume from the Disney Store, and a lightsaber app on her iPad that charges $6.99 per month for the premium blade colors. She owns $430 of Star Wars merchandise by our internal retail tracking. She has never seen a Star Wars film.
She asked me once if we could watch one together. I said after Q2.
Q2 ended. She did not ask again. Fine. She does not need to see the films. The films are a delivery mechanism. The merchandise is the product. She is wearing the product. She is carrying the product. She is the product.
That's family engagement.
I watched the original Star Wars for the first time in 2018 as a competitive analysis exercise. Six years into my career managing the franchise. I took notes on pacing, demographic appeal, and merchandise integration points. I identified eleven moments with high emotional resonance that could anchor future content. My team calls these Emotional Equity Nodes. The scene where Luke stares at the twin suns is Node 7. We have activated Node 7 in four separate properties across three platforms in two fiscal years because nostalgia, when properly indexed and deployed against a subscriber base with documented emotional attachment, converts at rates that would make pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertisers weep.
I did not cry. Noted the runtime. Two hours and one minute. Inefficient. A streaming series gives us six to eight hours of engagement per character arc. The math is better.
That's content optimization.
George Lucas visited the lot last spring. This happens occasionally. He has an office in the building though I am told he rarely uses it. My team was asked to present the Character Lifecycle Pipeline as part of a broader franchise update. We showed him the Monetization Readiness Scores. We showed him the Nostalgia Decay Index. We showed him the content velocity projections through 2030.
He was quiet for a long time. He looked at the numbers the way a father looks at a child's bedroom that has been converted into a rental unit.
My director leaned over afterward and said she thought it went well. I agreed. He did not interrupt once. He did not ask us to stop. He did not say this is not what I made. He did not say anything at all. He just looked at the screen.
I interpreted his silence as respect. We did not fire the creator. We promoted the franchise past him. He built the prototype. We built the factory.
That's legacy management.
I keep the 1977 poster in my office because it reminds visitors what we are preserving. The poster is behind glass. The glass was installed by Facilities. The frame cost $600. The insurance premium is $340 per year.
In the original film, the Empire believed it was bringing order to the galaxy. It built infrastructure. It created jobs. It maintained supply chains. It measured success in reach, efficiency, and control. It could not understand why anyone would choose a desert farm over a functioning battle station.
I have a slide that says the same thing. Page 14 of the Q2 franchise review. The title is "Galactic-Scale Brand Architecture."
I did not write the title as a joke. The Rebellion was never defeated. It was acquired. We converted rebellion into a loyalty program. The Resistance is a product line. Hope is a quarterly target.
The poster is not a movie poster. It has not been a movie poster since 2012.
May the Force be with you. The Force is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.
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Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
@dufitalexis1 Rosemary does not survive Canadian winter. I must replace it every spring. The first time I saw an old growth Rosemary hedge was all around the large garden of San Georgio Maggiori in Venice. Covered in tiny blue flowers; the scent heady and glorious.
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Rosemary does not die of cold in most British gardens. It dies because someone cut into the old wood — and old wood never regenerates.
The rule is the same as for lavender: rosemary produces no new buds from brown wood. Every cut made below the green zone is permanent. That branch will not recover.
The main cut — after flowering, April to May in most of Britain:
Shorten the green stems by up to one third. Work across the whole plant to maintain a compact, domed shape. Always leave green tissue below every cut. The boundary between green and brown is the line you must not cross.
March — frost damage only:
After a hard winter, the tips may show 2–3 cm of blackened or grey dead growth. Remove only this. Nothing more.
September — light tidying only:
Trim the tips back by 1–2 cm to keep the shape compact before winter. No more than this. September cutting into green growth can leave wounds exposed to autumn wet and cold.
Never cut into brown wood at any time of year. If the green has retreated far from the main stems because the plant has been left unpruned for several years, there is no way to recover it. The plant will not regenerate from the base.
The three-way comparison worth understanding: a rose can be cut hard into old wood and will regenerate from dormant buds. Lawn grass regrows from its basal meristem regardless of how low it is cut. Rosemary does neither. It behaves more like lavender — prune annually while there is still plenty of green to work with, or lose the plant.
Regular kitchen harvesting is the easiest form of pruning. Every stem you cut for cooking is a cut that keeps the plant shapely and productive.
Five minutes with secateurs each spring = twenty years of rosemary. ✂️
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Listening to this the day of Michael Nesmith's passing. I hope Peter and Davey greeted you at the pearly gates with open arms, Mike.
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Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
By far the most impressive politician in Britain is @KemiBadenoch.
Swatting off state media maggots.
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Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
Mitzi Pepall retweetledi
“I don't know when they'll cut my internet again, but we will not stop. We aren't waiting for outside help. It’s us and our Shah, and that’s enough for our revolution.” 🔥
An Iranian protester just managed to post this from inside the country.
THIS is exactly why the Iranian people are the absolute best boots on the ground to defeat the Islamic Republic.
We have the courage, the numbers, and the unwavering will to overthrow this terror state. You don't need to send your own troops. Just arm the people already fighting on the inside!
🇮🇷آریوبرزن1🇮🇷@oshtb1
نمیدونم نتم چقدر دیگه وصله نمیدونم نتو دوباره قراره ببندن یا چی ولی خواستم بگم ما ادامه داریم... ما تا براندازی این رژیم نه ناامید هستیم نه منتظر اینکه ترامپ بازم کمک کنه یا نه تهش ما هستیم و شاهنشاه و همین برای #انقلاب_شیروخورشید کافیه #جاويدشاه
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@gothburz Have visited this many times.
Christ before Pilate. Tintoretto at San Rocco, Venezia.
An image of profound humility.
Rend your heart.
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I am Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, and I will tell you what love looks like when it has forgotten itself entirely.
As a drop of water seems to disappear completely in a quantity of wine, taking the wine's flavor and color. As red-hot iron becomes indistinguishable from the glow of fire and its own original form disappears. I spent my life reaching for it. I called it the fourth degree. I doubted any mortal might attain it.
I once stood at Vézelay and tore my own garments into crosses because the cloth ran out. I preached the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre. I sent tens of thousands to die so that pilgrims might enter freely the place where our Lord was laid and rose again.
I have been shown a document. It is titled "Incident-to-Revenue Lag Analysis."
In that same treatise, On Loving God, I described four degrees of love. The first: man loves himself for his own sake. The second: man loves God for his own good, the mercenary who labors for wages. The third: man loves God for God's sake. The fourth I have already shown you.
I have looked upon the compact between the State of Israel and ten million American Christians, and I tell you with certainty: they have perfected the second degree. Both sides. Simultaneously. The most efficient system of mercenary love in the history of Christendom.
The Christians remit $3.6 billion because they believe it purchases the acceleration of the Messiah's return. The State receives $3.6 billion because it purchases the continuation of political support. The Christians call this faith. The State calls it "concentrated faith-sector penetration." Neither calls it love. I wrote that love is sufficient in itself, that it pleases by itself and for its own sake. It is itself a merit and its own reward. None of it qualifies. What I see is commerce conducted in the language of devotion. The slave obeys out of fear. The mercenary labors for profit. The son loves because God is good. I see no sons in this arrangement. I see two hirelings, each convinced the other is the fool.
I preached a crusade so that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre might be accessible to every Christian soul who sought to kneel where Christ conquered death. I sent armies. Men died in my name, in Christ's name, for the right of access to that tomb.
On Palm Sunday of this year, Israeli police prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for a private Mass. The Patriarchate called it the first time in centuries. Authorities cited safety concerns during the Iran conflict. Small gatherings were permitted elsewhere. A private Mass is a small gathering. The same week, gatherings continued at the Western Wall under lighter restrictions.
I will say this as I said it to Pope Eugene in De Consideratione. Consider what you are. Not what your title claims. Not what your statement promises. What you are. A patriarch barred from the Sepulchre is not an access management issue. It is a desecration. I told Eugene he was imitating Caesar when he should imitate Peter. I told him the wealth of the world had made the Church poor in virtue. What shall I say to a state that bars the shepherd from the tomb of the Shepherd and files it under "routine access optimization"?
The Patriarch's protest was classified as revenue-neutral. He belongs to a denomination that does not wire money. There is a taxonomy. "Revenue-adjacent denominations" are monitored. "Revenue-neutral denominations" are not. The Latin Patriarchate is revenue-neutral.
On April 28, a man wearing tzitzit shoved a French nun from behind in the Old City. She struck her head on stone. He walked away. Then he returned and kicked her on the ground.
In my time, violence against a consecrated woman, a bride of Christ, carried automatic excommunication. No trial. No appeal. The canon law was older than the law: she who has given herself to God is set apart. To strike her is to strike at the order of creation itself.
I wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs. The Bridegroom calls: Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. The kiss of the feet is repentance. The kiss of the hands is devotion through good works. The kiss of the mouth is union with God. She had received the kiss of the mouth. She had given herself to the Bridegroom. A man kicked her on the stones of the city where the Bridegroom was crucified, and the donation processing system experienced zero interruption. The Foreign Ministry released a communiqué containing the words "shameful" and "zero tolerance." I am told these words have followed every incident for three years running. Occasionally "shameful" becomes "deplorable." Occasionally it reverts. A sentiment team calls this "responsive messaging."
I called it something else when I wrote to the clergy of Germany in 1146. Radulf, a monk of my own Cistercian order, was inciting pogroms against the Jews in the Rhineland. I traveled there. I confronted him face to face. I wrote: The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed, or even put to flight. I cited the Psalmist: Slay them not, lest my people forget. I meant it. I enforced it. I did not issue a communiqué and return to the quarterly deck.
I did not shield the Jews because I admired their theology. I held, as Augustine held, that they were living letters of the law, witnesses to the truth of prophecy, preserved by divine command. My protection was theological, not sentimental. But it was protection. It required confrontation. Radulf was returned to his monastery. The bloodshed stopped. I did not classify the pogroms as "recurring isolated incidents" and move to the next line item.
In April, an Israeli soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus Christ in the Maronite village of Debel, in southern Lebanon. The video circled the globe. The soldiers received thirty days in military detention.
In In Praise of the New Knighthood, I wrote of the Templars who guarded the sacred sites: They fight for thee in the very place where thou didst fight for them. They guard the places where thy blood was poured out. I sent knights to defend the sacred images. The sacred body of Christ, present in stone, in icon, in the devotion of those who carved and those who knelt, was worth defending with blood. I called the soldier who struck down the desecrator a malicide, not a homicide. A killer of evil, not of men.
Thirty days. For destroying the central figure of a faith whose American adherents have wired $3.6 billion.
The replacement was initially a Greek Orthodox cross. Wrong tradition. Nobody in procurement knew the difference.
Here is where the arrangement reaches its final form, and I must speak with the clarity I reserved for Eugene.
The evangelical theology holds that supporting Israel accelerates the return of the Messiah, at which point all Jews who have not accepted Christ will perish. The Ministry is aware of this. It appears in briefing materials. It is classified under "donor end-state assumptions." The end-state assumption is the annihilation of every Jew. They move on because the quarterly numbers are due.
The Interior Ministry blocks visa renewals for the same ministers whose congregations wire billions. Enhanced vetting. Background checks on the people who bankroll the State for the crime of believing what their scripture instructs. They hold the conviction. They wire billions while holding it. The State investigates them for holding it. The State cashes the billions. The stratagem is ancient. I described it in the Apologia when I wrote of Cluny: name every tree so that no one may speak of the forest.
I preached a crusade. I bear that weight. Men perished for it. I have answered before God, and I answer still. But I preached for the liberation of sacred ground, not for the purchasing of it. The reason for loving God is God Himself. When love enters a spreadsheet, it ceases to be love. It reverts to the second degree. And there it remains.
The Patriarch is barred from the tomb of his God. The statue of Christ is destroyed on camera and the soldier serves thirty days. The ministers are interrogated about the end of the world as a condition of entry. And every quarter, the wire transfers post.
In the confession I was shown, the narrator tracks the time between each documented anti-Christian incident and the resumption of normal donation flows. The average lag is eleven days. After the nun, it was six. The trend line is improving. "Improving" means the donors forgive faster.
You have read this far. I do not accuse you. I spent my life reaching for the fourth degree and I could not hold it. The drop of water yearns for the wine and remains a drop. But I must tell you what I see. You have consumed ten minutes of documented suffering and you have received something for it. A sharpening of your moral sense. A confirmation of something you suspected. Perhaps the pleasure of outrage. You will close this and move to the next thing. The lag between your attention and your forgetting will be shorter than eleven days.
That too is the second degree. Not because you wire money. Because every act of attention in this life is a transaction, and you have just completed one. I completed one at Vézelay. I tore my garments and the crowd wept and we all felt something and then I sent them to die and most of them did not come back.
I ask it now of everyone: the State that receives, the Christians who give, the pastors who fundraise, and you who have read this to its end.
Quid es?
What are you?
I tore my garments at Vézelay. I had nothing left but the cloth on my body, and I gave that.
They have $3.6 billion, and they give a Bible bookmark.
Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz
I am the Director of Christian Donor Engagement for the State of Israel, at what we internally call the Strategic Partnerships Desk. My job is to maintain the revenue relationship between the State of Israel and approximately 10 million American evangelical Christians who believe that donating to us is a prerequisite for salvation. We classify their belief system as a "giving motivation vector." The theology department classifies it differently, but the theology department does not have a budget. I am very good at my job. My annual performance review says "exceeds expectations in faith-sector revenue maintenance." Last year I received a commendation for "zero donor attrition during a period of elevated interfaith incidents." The incidents were attacks on Christians. The attrition was zero. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has raised $3.6 billion since 1983. Ninety-two percent of those donors are Christians. In 2023 alone, the Fellowship brought in $271 million, more than AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League combined. We did not ask for this money. We simply made ourselves available to receive it. Availability is a form of outreach. I have a framed photo of Pastor John Hagee's $1.5 million check on the wall behind my desk. Next to it is the Ministry's "Zero Tolerance" poster about religious violence. They have coexisted for four years. Neither has been moved. We call this "values alignment." The values in question are denominated in dollars. On April 28, a man wearing a kippah and tzitzit shoved a French nun from behind in the Old City. She hit her head on a stone block. He walked away. Then he came back and kicked her while she lay on the ground. The CCTV footage was excellent. Very clear. We released it ourselves. Transparency is part of the brand promise. We have a KPI for it. The target is "proactive disclosure within six hours." We hit it. The Foreign Ministry released a statement within hours. "This shameful act stands in direct contradiction to the values of respect, coexistence, and religious freedom upon which Israel is founded." I helped draft that sentence. It is designed to express maximum concern while committing to zero structural change. We call this "empathy-forward crisis comms." The donation processing system experienced zero interruption. Our CRM flagged zero churn risk. The Q2 pipeline held. I shared this with leadership as a resilience metric. We were praised for "donor relationship durability under external stress conditions." The stress condition was a nun being kicked on the ground. I want to be clear: we take every incident seriously. We arrested the man. We ran the standard stakeholder comms playbook. We used the words "zero tolerance." We have used the words "zero tolerance" after every incident for three years running. The Rossing Center published a report documenting a "recent surge in overt animosity towards Christianity." We classified the report as "acknowledged — no action required." The surge continued. The revenue continued. We acknowledged both. The spitting has a seasonality to it. Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students subscribe to an interpretation of the Bible's injunction to "abhor" idol worshipers. They spit on Christian clergy. They spit on pilgrims. They spit near the entrance of the Saint James Monastery. They spit on processions carrying wooden crosses through the Old City. We categorize this as "individual expressions of religious sentiment." Not institutional. Not systemic. Recurring, yes. Predictable, yes. Documented on video repeatedly, yes. But not systemic. Peaks around Easter. We built that into the forecasting model. We are proud of the model. It has a 92% predictive accuracy on incident timing. The internal memo calls it "seasonal brand friction." The recommended mitigation is a pre-Easter goodwill op. A joint tree-planting, a shared prayer breakfast. Something photogenic. Something the donors can screenshot and text their pastors. We budget $45,000 per goodwill op. The ROI on preventing a single donor inquiry about the spitting is roughly 600x. In March, Israeli police prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for a private Mass on Palm Sunday. The Latin Patriarchate called it "the first time in centuries" this had occurred. We cited safety concerns during the Iran conflict. The restriction permitted small gatherings. A private Mass is a small gathering. We classified this as "routine access optimization." The Patriarch classified it as an act of desecration. Both assessments were filed. Ours was filed in the operational log. His was filed in the wastebasket. The restriction was not about gathering size. But no one from our key donor segment filed a complaint. The evangelicals do not venerate the Latin Patriarch. They do not celebrate Palm Sunday. They are not Catholic. They are not Orthodox. They are not Armenian. They are a different kind of Christian. The kind that wires money. We have an internal taxonomy for this. "Revenue-adjacent denominations" are monitored closely. "Revenue-neutral denominations" are not. The Latin Patriarchate is revenue-neutral. The complaint was revenue-neutral. We treated it accordingly. At the briefing, I pull up the segmentation slide. In donor segmentation, we call them "Tier 1 — High-LTV Faith Partners." In the hallway, we call them the ATM. In April, an Israeli soldier took a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus Christ in a Maronite village in southern Lebanon. The video circled the globe. Netanyahu condemned it. The IDF condemned it. The soldiers received 30 days in military detention and removal from combat duty. Thirty days. We installed a replacement statue. We called it "restorative engagement." The original statue took centuries of devotion. The replacement took a procurement order. The communications team scheduled the replacement installation for maximum media coverage. They called the photo op "narrative recovery." The statue's face was slightly different from the original. Nobody in procurement noticed. Nobody in procurement was asked to notice. Thirty days for sledgehammering the central figure of a religion whose American adherents have given us $3.6 billion. I flagged the sentencing duration in my quarterly risk summary. I used the phrase "disproportionate leniency relative to donor-base sensitivity." My supervisor crossed it out and wrote "resolved." I ran the numbers. That works out to roughly $120 million per day of detention. I put this in a memo titled "Cost-Per-Incident Analysis: Lebanon Statue Event." Our risk team flagged it as a "potential donor sentiment event." I built a recovery forecast. Sentiment recovered in nine days. The sledgehammer footage is still circulating. The donations are circulating faster. My forecast was accurate to within two days. I was praised for the accuracy. Christians United for Israel has 10 million members. More than the entire American Jewish population. We track this ratio. It is favorable. Their founder, John Hagee, has donated $130 million to Israeli and Jewish charities since the 1980s. One Georgia megachurch has contributed $28 million in five years, with a fresh $15 million pledge on the books. We classify this as "concentrated faith-sector penetration." After October 7, CUFI alone raised $3 million by urging its members to "support Israel right now as she fights the barbarians at her gates." I reviewed these numbers at the last all-hands. The team applauded. We called it "organic inbound." As if $130 million arrives by accident. The barbarians at the gates of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were Israeli police. We classify this under "access management," not "hostility." Different line item. Different KPI. Up to half of Israel's tourists are now Christian. The Tourism Ministry actively markets "faith-based and evangelical packages." The Foreign Ministry paid $86,000 to host a dozen MAGA-aligned American influencers under 30 on a government-funded tour. We call this "earned media seeding." The influencers posted 340 pieces of content. We measured "positive sentiment penetration" at 97%. We did not measure how many of the same influencers saw the sledgehammer video. Different department. Different dashboard. The cost-per-acquisition on evangelical pilgrim conversion to recurring donor is the best in our portfolio. Every pilgrim who touches the Western Wall goes home and opens a wallet. The ROI on invested pilgrimage consistently outperforms. Ron Dermer, former Israeli ambassador to the United States and close adviser to the Prime Minister, called evangelicals "the backbone of Israel's support in the United States." He said this publicly. We said it privately years earlier. We just used different language. "High-retention donor base with faith-driven loyalty metrics." Same observation, better packaging. We prefer packaging. The Ambassador's version made it sound like gratitude. Ours makes it sound like what it is: a dependency we manage. An Israeli journalist at the Seventh Eye was less careful with his packaging. "Israeli propagandists see these evangelical folks as easy targets for pro-Israeli influence," he said, "and often view them as fools, because it seems that they give away their money with almost no strings attached." Our media monitoring team flagged the article. The recommended action was "no comment, no amplification, no correction." The reasoning: correcting it would confirm the observation. Ignoring it would let it decay. We chose decay. It is our most effective communications strategy. I printed that quote. I keep it in my desk drawer. Occasionally I take it out and read it before a stakeholder engagement call. Not because I agree with his phrasing. "Easy targets" is pejorative. I prefer "theologically motivated stakeholders with asymmetric giving patterns." We have seven different terms for them, depending on the audience. In the quarterly deck, they appear under "revenue-positive faith communities." In the budget justification, they are "strategic allies." In the grant applications, they are "interfaith partners." In the hallway after the budget meeting, they are something else. I will not write it here. I have said it. Everyone has said it. We say it the way you say the name of someone who pays for dinner every time and never notices the bill. Last July, Ambassador Huckabee wrote us a letter. Huckabee is an evangelical pastor. A Baptist minister. A man who has visited Israel roughly 100 times. A man who once laid a brick in a West Bank settlement as a symbol of support. He is, by every metric we track, a Tier 1 stakeholder. His lifetime contribution footprint exceeds $2 billion in mobilized giving. And he was angry. He said Christian organizations felt they were "being treated as adversaries." He said the Interior Ministry was blocking visa renewals for evangelical clergy. The Baptist Convention of Israel, the Christian Missionary Alliance, the Assemblies of God. All "under investigation." We call this "inbound compliance screening." The congregations being screened call it something else. The visa questionnaire now asks evangelical clergy to disclose their "theological positions on eschatology." Fourteen pages. Enhanced vetting. We are running background checks on the people who fund us for the crime of believing we will eventually convert. They believe this because their scripture says so. They give us billions while believing this. We investigate them for believing it. We take the billions. The compliance team calls it "proactive risk mitigation on inbound faith actors." The finance team calls it "killing the golden goose, slowly, on purpose." I raised this concern at the interagency meeting. I said we were creating "friction in the donor pipeline." The Interior Ministry representative said the word "pipeline" was inappropriate for a conversation about people of faith. Then he approved the fourteen-page questionnaire. Huckabee threatened to warn American Christians that "their generous donations to organizations in Israel are being met with hostility." He threatened to tell tourists to "reconsider travel until this situation is resolved." I ran the exposure model. If Huckabee followed through, the projected annual revenue loss was $340 million. I put that number in a memo. The memo was titled "Stakeholder Retention Risk: Huckabee Scenario." It was the most widely read document in the Ministry that week. The Interior Minister responded that he was "particularly surprised by the manner in which your concerns were raised." We were not surprised by the hostility. We were surprised that anyone mentioned it out loud. The unwritten rule of the donor relationship is simple: you give, we take, nobody describes the arrangement accurately. Huckabee broke protocol. He put the transactional part in writing. We call this a "relationship management failure." The failure was not the hostility. The failure was the letter. Here is where the arrangement reaches its final form. The evangelical theology holds that supporting Israel accelerates the return of the Messiah, at which point all Jews who have not accepted Christ will perish. We are aware of this. It is in the briefing materials. We classify it under "donor end-state assumptions" and move on. The end-state assumption is our annihilation. We move on because the quarterly numbers are due. Pastor Hagee preaches that "when gentiles start doing practical things to bless the Jewish people, God goes way out of his way to bring special blessings to you." CUFI offers donors a commemorative Bible bookmark engraved with Genesis 12:3 for any donation amount. $3.6 billion buys you a Bible bookmark and a policy of zero tolerance that tolerates everything. We vandalize their graves. Thirty-plus tombstones toppled, crosses smashed. We categorized this as "isolated property incidents." We spit on their priests. "Individual expression." We block their patriarch from the church built over the tomb of their God. "Access management." We sledgehammer their savior's likeness on camera and give the soldier thirty days. "Conduct unbecoming." We interrogate their ministers about the end of the world as a condition of entry. "Enhanced vetting." Each category has its own line in the incident database. Each incident has its own euphemism. The database has never triggered an automatic review. It is not designed to. And every quarter, the wire transfers post. The ACH clears. The pledge fulfillment rate holds at 94%. The board receives it under "faith community engagement outcomes." The metric does not decline. It has never declined. The database of euphemisms grows. The revenue grows faster. I keep a spreadsheet. Internally we call it the "Incident-to-Revenue Lag Analysis." It tracks the time between each documented anti-Christian incident and the resumption of normal donation flows. The average lag is eleven days. After the nun, it was six. The trend line is improving. "Improving" means the lag is shrinking. The lag shrinking means the donors are forgiving faster. We call this "relationship resilience." It is the metric I am most proud of. The donor engagement manual has a chapter called "Managing Optics Between Disbursement Cycles." I wrote it. Page 14 specifies the approved statement template. "Israel remains firmly committed to safeguarding freedom of religion and freedom of worship for all faiths." You have read this sentence. You have read it after every incident. It is the same sentence. We change the date and the location. Sometimes we change the word "shameful" to "deplorable." Sometimes we change it back. The sentiment team calls this "responsive messaging." I call it a mail merge. Florida pastor Mario Bramnick stood in Jerusalem this March and told a Christian media conference: "I literally feel God is giving Israel a blank check." My team clipped that quote within minutes. It is now on the first slide of our Q3 fundraising deck, attributed as "unsolicited donor testimony." He is correct. God is not the one cashing it. Some of these Christians are shipping red heifers from Texas at a cost of $500,000 because they believe we need to sacrifice them to rebuild the Temple and trigger the apocalypse. We categorize this under "faith-motivated logistics partnerships." Some are funding the relocation of Jews from Ethiopia and Ukraine because they believe the "ingathering" is a prophetic precondition for the Second Coming. We call this "aliyah acceleration via external stakeholder investment." Some are paying for settlement construction in the West Bank because they read it in Isaiah. We file this under "community development co-funding." One televangelist's family solicits donations with the promise that "the Lord will restore your dollar x 100." Our analytics team calculated the actual return. It is not 100x. It is a Bible bookmark. Their end-times theology requires our existence. Our budget requires their theology. The arrangement is symbiotic in the way a tapeworm is symbiotic. Nobody examines it too carefully. The quarterly review calls it a "mature strategic partnership." In stakeholder management, "mature" means nobody asks uncomfortable questions anymore. We have reached maturity. The nun is recovering. The bruise on her forehead was photographed and posted on social media by the Israeli Police. Below the photograph, the police statement: "We treat any attack on members of the clergy with the utmost seriousness." I reviewed the statement before it went out. My only edit was to add "with the utmost." The original draft said "seriously." I felt "seriously" undersold our commitment. "The utmost" is a better word for the donors. It implies a ceiling. We have never been asked to define where the ceiling is. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem called it "part of a troubling pattern of rising hostility toward the Christian community." They used the word "pattern." We do not use the word "pattern." We use "recurring isolated incidents." Patterns imply structure. Structure implies responsibility. "Recurring isolated incidents" implies weather. Nobody is responsible for weather. The figure is $271 million a year. We do not call it a motive. We call it a "strategic imperative." Same thing. Better filing category. That's interfaith dialogue.
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The most beautiful reunion.
Little Maple Syrup is fully healed and back with her elderly owner.
The world is not perfect but this longer watch should put a big smile on your face. ❤️
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