Stephen Jaffe

Go M’s, Go Hawks

[Seattle Mariners @Mariners]

From the mound to the clubhouse and throughout our community, thank you for everything, Luis 💙

We wish you and your family nothing but the best with the White Sox.

[Seattle Seahawks @Seahawks]

Friendly reminder why we picked at 32. 😌

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this collection should mass-humble every streaming service on the planet.

One guy. A Sony cassette recorder. 10,000 concerts over 40 years. 30,000 individual sets from 3,000+ artists. R.E.M., The Cure, Nirvana, Björk, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, Phish, Tracy Chapman, Boogie Down Productions.

His first recording of Nirvana was July 8, 1989 at a tiny club called Dreamerz. Kurt Cobain was 20 years old. The band introduced themselves by saying they were from Seattle. This was two full years before Nevermind existed. That tape is now cleaned up and streaming for free.

The digitization operation alone is wild. One volunteer drives to Jacobs' house monthly, picks up 10-20 boxes of 50-100 tapes each, runs them through 10 simultaneous cassette decks he repaired himself. 5,500 tapes digitized since late 2024. Dozens more volunteers across the US and Europe do mastering, metadata, and setlist verification. Sometimes they contact the actual artists to confirm what songs were played.

The collection went from 171 recordings in January 2025 to over 2,300 by April 2026. At this rate it'll take years to upload everything.

Spotify has 100 million tracks. Apple Music has 100 million. Neither has a recording of Nirvana's first Chicago show. A guy with a tape recorder in his pocket does.

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

There are no words.

[Aaron Goldsmith @heygoldy]

The Mariners social/video team is unmatched. Incredibly talented group of people.

[danisha carter @danishacarterr]

social media is currently (and will continue to be) flooded with bots and extremists begging you to become scared, angry, and violent - calling for
"war" and radicalization. you absolutely must reject it.

in war (or anything similar on american soil) you will not be a superhero, let alone a survivor. you'll be taken out by a google pixel drone operated by people miles away, funded by one of the many special interest groups and lobbyists trying to decimate this country from the inside.
don't kill your neighbor.

don't trust those pushing tensions that make it more likely that you will come to blows with them. mass political violence will endanger your family and our social fabric while empowering the worst actors imaginable. don't destroy your country.

[Clue Heywood @ClueHeywood]

Watched Geno and Naylor have a lot of fun in Seattle tonight, on a team trying to win it all, so I’m jumping on the Mariners bandwagon the rest of the year, all DBacks fans should, go M’s

[TG Casino @TGCasino_]

Retweet to bless someone's timeline:

[Stephen Jaffe @jaffmania]

@RealFletch17 @grok is this ai?

[Spencer Joseph @SpencerJJoseph]

Before anyone asks about land rights and the state of Israel, the real question is why Jews were legally denied land rights by the Ottomans and then the British in Palestine ?

Oh wait. That sounds like apartheid.

[Stephen Jaffe @jaffmania]

@GaryHillJr I definitely got your diabetus joke and it cracked me up. You rule my man

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

Holy crap. What a photo!!!!

[Stephen Jaffe @jaffmania]

@ValentinaForSOS @iFightForKids God’s plan for you was losing, freak! Get a life!

[Kobe Bryant Stories & Motivation @kobehighlight]

Captain America 🇺🇸

[Scott Van Pelt @notthefakeSVP]

The man took a joyride through the cosmos.

Thank you for your life.

[David Hogg 🟧 @davidhogg111]

The more I learn about how politicians both Democrats and Republicans get corrupted by K street I get so fucking angry. DC is such a slimy place. It’s truly disgusting I don’t know how 90% of our members of Congress sleep at night. They’re such cowards.

[Daniel Sugarman @Daniel_Sugarman]

More than 250 Jewish students at Columbia have signed this open letter.

If you have 5 minutes today, take the time to read it. Because the sentiments it expresses are what the overwhelming majority of Jewish people feel.

https://t.co/rNJx3bYawx

[Havoc @Havoc_Six]

Tanks/jets/drones are sexy, but note how quickly combat engineering becomes a priority when the operating environment changes.

We all saw how a layered trench/defense system can cause headaches. Today, Russians are losing insane amounts of men and material crashing against existing defenses. Want to pump up those numbers?

Force them into a brick wall of mines, anti-tank trenches, anti-tank missiles, and artillery.

Consider donating today, if able.

[Eli Manning @EliManning]

I thought about attending the Roast of Tom Brady last night, but I did not want to Roast him for a 3rd time!!

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

What being pro-Palestine means to me / my platform: I'm passionately, unequivocally, and without hesitation, a proponent of the Palestinian people’s just and urgent aspirations for self-determination, liberation, sovereignty, and safety. I grew up in Gaza, where I experienced Israeli violence and bombardment, including one incident that almost killed me and caused me permanent hearing impairment; my family is still in Gaza and has suffered dozens of deaths during this latest war; my grandparents were expelled from their ancestral homelands in 1948 and fled to the Gaza Strip; and my parents were raised in a refugee camp in Rafah during the 1950s. This background informs and influences me and speaks to why I care about the Palestinian issue and consider myself pro-Palestine. I am motivated by a sincere desire to see my people obtain their legitimate and undeniable rights, which they have not had for decades.

Yet I, and many others, especially those who are silent or are forced to be quiet, struggle with finding a political home in today’s pro-Palestine movement. Increasingly, it feels as if pro-Palestine activism is dominated by maximalists (wanting all of historic Palestine and other zero-sum positions and approaches), slogan-driven voices, and narratives. There is a lack of pragmatic and humanistic ability to hold multiple truths at once and to advocate nuanced and color-rich positions and views that are not black-and-white depictions and understandings of the Israel and Palestine conflict.

Here’s what, to me, an effective and meaningful pro-Palestine platform entails:

1. Supporting the right of Palestinians to a sovereign and independent state living in peace side by side with Israel.

2. Condemning Israeli government actions, policies, priorities, and decisions that kill, harm, undermine, or oppress the Palestinian people.

3. Criticizing and decrying the conduct of the war in Gaza, the military occupation in the West Bank, and the Israeli government’s disregard for Palestinian civilian lives, and the destruction of property and cities.

4. Rejecting, denouncing, and exposing the theft of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and the sprawling settlement enterprise and settler violence.

5. Supporting highly targeted, specific, and effective sanctions against individuals, groups, and entities that are enabling the unjust and illegal occupation of the West Bank and harming Palestinian civilians.

6. Denouncing and combating the dehumanization of the Palestinian people or the denial of their existence as people with the right to live on the land they called home for generations.

7. Acknowledging the tragedy experienced by hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians from 1948 and giving them/their descendants the right to return to the lands of a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

8. Understanding past and contemporary mistakes that have set the Palestinian people back by decades and made them pawns in ideologies and geopolitical programs, agendas, and designs.

9. Developing a pragmatic and realistic framework for recognizing Israel’s existence, right to exist, and the inevitability of its continued existence, all of which should inform how a solution is approached.

10. Dispensing with delusional and destructive elements of the Palestinian narrative and acknowledging that there will not be a full liberation of all of Palestine, there will not be a right of return to what is now mainland Israel, and that Israel cannot and should not be confronted militarily or through any form of violence.

11. Promoting a cultural shift away from revolutionary rhetoric, martyrdom, and armed resistance, and instead, rebranding coexistence and peace as a courageous and necessary evolution to preserve Palestinian lives, lands, and heritage and foster a new generation of nation-builders who are focused on doing the most with what the Palestinians currently have and can have in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

12. Denouncing and rejecting antisemitism while also acknowledging that Zionists and Israelis are a diverse group/people and that the Palestinians have to work with all of these segments to have sustainable coexistence and peace.

13. Understanding how violent/hateful rhetoric, actions, and mistakes are detrimental because they empower right-wing and extremist forces in Israel who are opposed to Palestinian rights and that persistent mistakes and incendiary rhetoric and proclamations erode support for the Palestinian people and cause.

14. Recognizing Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability when taking actions that have negative consequences and outcomes and acknowledging that, while there’s an asymmetry of power dynamics, Palestinian leaders, political groups, and prominent figures should make rational and responsible choices to optimize for better prospects.

15. Accepting that even with East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, access to holy sites must always be shared and open to all.

16. Realizing how nefarious regional players like the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies are not sincere or helpful allies to the Palestinian people and have done so much damage to the entire region and the Palestinian cause.

17. Developing the capacity to hear Jewish perspectives and grievances, historical and contemporary, to understand why pro-Israel supporters believe what they do and why Israel means so much to so many, even if one disagrees with those opinions and views.

18. Understanding that Hamas recklessly endangered Palestinian lives and placed the people of Gaza in significant harm and that the group relies on Palestinian suffering as part of its strategy to delegitimize Israel globally while perpetuating the conflict without any meaningful resolution.

19. Registering the dangers of Islamist rhetoric and ideology that seeks to Islamize Palestinian society and to turn the Palestinian national project into a religious one in pursuit of an Islamic state that, by default, will be exclusionary and incapable of accommodating diverse residents in a future Palestinian country.

I am compelled to share the aforementioned because, for far too many people, pro-Palestine activism has been reduced to incendiary language that fails to capture the multiple moving parts of what is needed to advance the just and urgent Palestinian aspirations for freedom and independence. While many students, activists, advocates, academics, and analysts have their hearts in the right place, many cannot present viable and pragmatic ideas that are not mere rhetorical statements and empty slogans.

I know that many strongly disagree with my views and opinions, and that’s entirely fine. Still, many more are eager to see a recalibration of pro-Palestine activism to actually help the Palestinians achieve statehood instead of inflaming division and fostering hostility towards supporters of Israel and the Jewish community. Many in Palestine are aware of the need to be pragmatic and don’t think that angry protests, BDS, antisemitism, endless academic lectures, social media activism, or “feel good” slogans will actually make a difference.

It’s time for a rejuvenated pro-Palestine movement that serves as a big tent to encompass multiple views and opinions and to invite and promote broad alliances, especially with mainstream Jewish and Israeli communities, to work towards a just and sustainable resolution of the conflict once and for all. This is entirely attainable and achievable with humility, civility, patience, compassion and kindness, perseverance and determination, a willingness to accept reasonable compromises and accommodations, and, most importantly, the recognition of both sides’ undeniable and mutual humanity.