Thomas Wictor

Today the blog hit 54,000 views per post. It’s no longer possible for me to keep pumping money into this thing. This a truly metastatic phenomenon. However, being forced to stop is a blessing in disguise. I need to move on to other things.

Metastatic growth

For those of you who want a wildly popular blog, think twice. You have to figure out a way to monetize it. In the current era, people think they deserve everything for free. I asked all the readers to donate one dollar each, which would allow me to keep going.

Over 46,000 people read that request. Of those 46,000, about forty donated. That’s 0.09 percent. Nine hundredths of 1 percent.

I could use ads, but they ruin the aesthetics of a Website.

Auto-play videos, pop-up ads, windows that open in the middle of the page…

I hate the Jerusalem Post. The page never stops loading, and the text constantly shifts place as new ads appears.

Below is a news piece that contains sixty-nine words. Look at all the ads.

See how I made a video from the screen grabs? I do that a lot. It requires time and effort.

Each of my posts is over 1000 words and gets 54,000 views. To continue blogging, I’d have to make this a subscription site or use even more ads than the Jerusalem Post does.

Metastatic resentment

Stopping is the right decision. When I began defending Israel, an Israeli con artist fleeced me of a gigantic sum of money by pretending that we were going to make a documentary about how Hamas murdered Ismail Bakr, Mohammed Bakr, Ahed Bakr, and Zakaria Bakr.

People never understood that I solved that case because the boys’ murders kept me awake at night. It was deeply personal. I find it beyond my comprehension that the commander of the murder-operation walks free.

The experience of defending Israel left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. It seemed that too many Israelis reject improvement. Instead, they embrace the status quo. Israel wages futile war while her own people swallow enemy propaganda like baby birds gulping down worms that their Palestinian mommy shoves into their little beaks.

Then I proved that massive change is underway in the Middle East. But it didn’t translate into people offering to help me finance this Website.

And that made me angry.

Rather, it made me more angry. I’ve been angry at Middle Easterners for a while. Most of them embrace old, dead, suicidal, stupid customs. Therefore I’m not the right person to document the transformation of the Middle East.

I could do it if it weren’t costing me a fortune, but it would just be foolish for me to continue as is. There’s no upside. And I have a lot of other things I want to do.

Metastatic plans

In order to make everything work the way I want, I need to retire the name “Thomas Wictor,” thanks to Ali Gharib and Michael Shaw. I have several long-form writing projects in the works, but I’ll publish them under pseudonyms. And they’re years in the future. Right now I need to prepare for my move to another state. The work that lies ahead of me is like climbing all of these.

One of the reasons I blogged so much is that I have severe osteoarthritis. Three of my vertebrae are bone on bone, and my right hip is almost gone. Three weeks ago I began swimming three hours a day, three times a week. I didn’t want to join a fitness club because their pools tend to be dirty. However, I had to do something, or else I’d end up in a wheelchair.

The swimming is amazing. I’m already losing weight, and the pain in my back and hip is diminishing. The pool is full of Chinese immigrants who shout in Mandarin, crowd into you in the water, and then get out to loudly hawk and spit into wastebaskets. But my contact with them won’t last forever.

As part of my own transformation, I’m not going to spend any more time putting myself out for people who are indifferent to the effort I made for them. This is the research for last night’s post.

When you’re trying to understand new weaponry, you make a lot of guesses. For example, even though I didn’t mention it last night, I thought that the Arab League commandos were using a spotting rifle, also called a “ranging gun.” This is a .50-caliber rifle attached to an artillery piece to tell the gunner when he’s on target.

Since that’s 1950s technology, I didn’t think a spotting rifle was a possibility. So I gave up trying to figure where the shot above originated.

But I’m stubborn. As a result, today I discovered the answer.

An Arab League commando crept up to within a stone’s throw from the tank, lay in a crater, and fired a fragmentation munition. These fragments flew upward from the pavement and destroyed the barrel of the tank. You can see the commando, the smoke from his munition, the weapon in flight, and the detonation.

Nobody else on earth is giving you this information.

But now I have to stop.

Metastasizing sorrow

In the final analysis, I’m sick of war. The Arab League has invented a new doctrine that wages war on military objects, not humans. You saw with your own eyes that an Arab commando risked everything to disable a Hezbollah tank. That man deserves 200 Medals of Honor. I have no idea how the Arab League was able to train its soldiers to fight this way. It infuriates me when westerners denigrate Arab military capabilities.

Yet in the end, the Arab commandos had to kill a very large number of Hezbollah fighters—murderous cretins in denial, who had to be put down like mad dogs.

Today the United Nations doubled the number of people allegedly killed in the Yemen war. It’s not true. There’s no evidence for it. The new statistic is that Saudi-led Coalition air strikes killed 2279 civilians. Only liars would claim that, and only morons would believe it. The UN wants you to think that the Saudis drop a $500,000 precision-guided bomb to kill 10 children at a birthday party in a religious school that has a market and a pet shop.

In reality, the Saudis could kill 2279 civilians with every air strike. I have to stop exposing myself to this metastatic toxicity because it’s threatening my mental health. The UN is a cesspool of corruption, child molestation, Jew-hate, and support for terrorism. This is what Saudis should bomb.

Israel and the Arab League have made peace, and they’ll gradually pound the entire region into submission. The Iranian mullahs and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are doomed.

Metastatic mother

My mother CeeCee and I had a very troubled relationship. When she wasn’t distant, she was hypercritical and belligerent.

I confronted her once about it, and she had a breakdown. After she died, I discovered why she couldn’t accept me. In this photo of us, her body language and disconnected smile tell our story.

Despite—or because of—our problems, I became her closest confidant in the final three years of her life. Though she reverted to her previous hostility six months before her death, I realize now that she simply carried too great a burden to handle. She should’ve given me up for adoption.

Mom’s favorite artistic motif was the heart. She made hearts from every possible medium and used them in her projects. A few days ago, as I was wandering in her pergola, a rock fell at my feet.

I looked around, but there was no place from which the rock could’ve come, unless a California condor dropped it.

The white patterns are quartz. To me, the one on the left looks like a winged skull, and the one on the right is a woman in a long dress running with a heavy club raised above her head. She’s about to smash Death…to death.

Metastatic peace

That’s what will happen in the Middle East. Death is washed up. Right now I’m alone is being able to see it, but you can take that prediction to the bank.

And I’ve done enough. It’s time for me to concentrate on my own life. The Website will remain as is—an archive of fiction, nonfiction, art, ideas, and analyses that were simply too unorthodox for this period of history.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

—Matthew 5:9