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Acceptance Means Focusing On The Present While Assessing The Choices Available To You In This Moment. If There Are Many Possibilities, Make The Choice That Is Likely To Bring The Most Evolutionary Results. If There Is Only One Choice, Take It. If There Are No Obvious Choices, Relax And Accept The Fact That For Now, You Cannot Do Anything.

-David Simon

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Acceptance Means Focusing On

David Simon

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Acceptance Means Focusing On The Present While Assessing The Choices Available To You In This Moment. If There Are Many Possibilities, Make The Choice That Is Likely To Bring The Most Evolutionary Results. If There Is Only One Choice, Take It. If There Are No Obvious Choices, Relax And Accept The Fact That For Now, You Cannot Do Anything.

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If I Had To Guess And Put A Name On It, I'd Say That At Some Point, The Drug War Was As Much A Function Of Class And Social Control As It Was Of Racism.

Transitions Are A Part Of Life, Allowing For Perpetual Renewal. When You Experience The End Of One Chapter, Allow Yourself To Feel The Emotions Of Loss And Rebirth. A Bud Gives Way To A New Flower, Which Surrenders To The Fruit, Which Gives Rise To A Seed, Which Yields A New Sprout. Even As You Ride The Roller Coaster, Embrace The Centered Internal Reference Of The Ever-present Witness.

Healing From Our Past Is An Essential Aspect Of Expanding Our Sense Of Self And Awakening Our Capacity To Love. This Shift Often Manifests As A Change In The Questions We've Been Asking Ourselves. Instead Of What Do I Need? We Ask, How Can I Serve? Instead Of What Am I Getting Out Of This? We Start To Ask, What Can I Bring To This Situation To Promote The Highest Possible Outcome For Everyone Involved?

The Murder Clearance Rate Now In My City Baltimore Is Almost Non-existent. Nobody Can Solve A Murder, Nobody Can Do Any Actual Police Work, Because They've Learned How To Do Bad Police Work, Chase Drugs. Fighting Vice, While Being Unable To Respond To Sin. Generations Of Cops Have Learned How Not To Police Work By Policing The Drug War. Not Only Are They Police Brutal, They're Ineffective. Baltimore Is More Violent Than It Has Ever Been In Modern History.

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It Is Your Birthright To Have A Life Of Meaning And Purpose. Whether Or Not The People In Your Life Have Consistently Celebrated Your Incarnation, You Deserve To Celebrate Your Existence.

We're Now Seeing Levels Of Inequality Raise Their Heads That We Haven't Seen Since The Age Of The Robber Barons. If Somebody Watched The Deuce, And Understood The Allegory About Capital And Labor, And Understands What Happens When One Side Is Vulnerable To The Other, That Would Be Swell.

Every Day, Human Beings Are Worth Less. That's The Triumph Of Capitalism. The Money Gets Made, And The Fewer People We Need To Make That Money.

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Life Is Too Short

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Pyramid Schemes

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Boiled Down To Its Core, The Truth Is Always A Simple, Solid Thing

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Enthusiasm For Life

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That's What We Were Interested In: How Power And Money Ran Itself, Much More So Than 'drugs Are Bad, Drugs Are Good.' That Seems To Me A Simple Moral Equation And One You Don't Have To Spend 60 Hours Of Television Examining. And I Think The Same Thing Is True With How We Approached Pornography Or Prostitution. Prostitution's Been Around Since The Bible, And Pornography's Been Around Since About 15 Minutes After The French Guy Invented The First Camera.

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I Had A Great Editor, Rebecca Corbett, From The Time I Was A City Reporter Right Through To The Years I Worked On The 'sun's' Enterprise Reporting Team.

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I Feel Like If You Know Any Women Who's An Essayist Or A Writer Or A Public Speaker Or Just A Public Person, And They Have Any Presence At All In Any Kind Of Social Media, Or Any Place Where Men Can Voice At Them, You Have To Be Pretty Amazed At The Level Of Special Provocation And Sort Of Violent Speech And Misogyny That Comes At Them. Any Woman That's Really In The Public Sphere Has Experienced This. It's Kind Of Shocking How Universal It Is.

What We Were Trying To Do Was Take The Notion Of Greek Tragedy, Of Fated And Doomed People, And Instead Of These Olympian Gods, Indifferent, Venal, Selfish, Hurling Lightning Bolts And Hitting People In The Ass For No Reason — Instead Of Those Guys Whipping It On Oedipus Or Achilles, It’s The Postmodern Institutions . . . Those Are The Indifferent Gods.

Homicide Is The Major Leagues, The Center Ring, The Show. It Always Has Been ... It Goes Beyond Academic Degrees, Specialized Training Or Book Learning, Because All The Theory In The World Means Nothing If You Can't Read The Street.

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You Have The Capacity To Change The Plot Line Of Your Life, Even If You've Been Acting From The Same Script Since Before You Can Remember. No Matter What Has Happened Up To This Point, You Have The Right And The Capacity To Be Happy. You Are An Innately Creative Being, Capable Of Writing A Love Story Worth Living.

You Shoot Another Guy—well, Okay, This Is Baltimore. You Shoot Three Guys, It’s Time To Admit You Have A Problem.

I Encourage You From The Depths Of My Heart And Being To Know That You Have The Full Capacity And The Right To Make Changes That Will Enliven Your Awareness, Raise The Succulent Joy In Your Heart, And Experience The Vitality That Comes From Living In Balance.

From A Spiritual Perspective, Freedom From Attachment To A Particular Outcome Is The Ultimate Expression Of Liberation. We Can Choose The Actions We Take, But We Cannot Control The Consequences Of Our Choices.

You Have The Capacity To Change The Plotline Of Your Life, Even If You've Been Acting From The Same Script Since Before You Can Remember.

Eating A Meal With Full Awareness Can Be A Powerful, Enlightening, And Healing Experience.

We Didn't Create The Culture Of Film. We Certainly Market It Better Than Anyone In The World, But Film Could Have Happened Anywhere. It's Not Distinctly American, As Witnessed By The Fact That There Are Film Communities Throughout The World That Tell Stories To Their Own Cultural Liking.

Eventually, Someone Is Going To Pick Up A Brick.

America Is A Country That Is Now Utterly Divided When It Comes To Its Society, Its Economy, Its Politics. There Are Definitely Two Americas. I Live In One, On One Block In Baltimore That Is Part Of The Viable America, The America That Is Connected To Its Own Economy, Where There Is A Plausible Future For The People Born Into It.

I'd Love If People Relearned The Lessons Of The 20th Century All Over Again. Which Is To Say This Country Progressed Economically And Socially When We Had A Better Balance Between Capital And Labor. Neither Capital Or Labor Won Every Argument. The Battle Between The Two Created Economic Tension, And Transformed The Working Class Into The Middle Class, And Grew The Economy.

Rural America's Not Coming Back. That Idea Was Lost With The Industrial Revolution. And Yet With More Than 80 Percent Of Americans Living In Metropolitan Areas, There Are Still Demagogues Who Want To Run Down The Idea Of Multiculturalism, Of Urbanity, Being The Only Future We Have. We Either Live Or Die Based On How We Live In Cities, And Our Society Is Either Going To Be Great Or Not Based On How We Perform As Creatures Of The City.

In Baltimore They Can't Do Police Work To Save Their Lives. Now Because Of Freddie Gray They're Not Even Getting Out Of The Car And Policing Corners - They're On A Job Slowdown, Basically. Right Now If The Police Stopped Being Brutal, If We Got Police Shooting Under Control, And The Use Of Excessive Force, If We Have A Meaningful Societal Response To All That Stuff, And The Racism That Underlies It, The Question Still Remains: What Are They Policing, And Why?

Health Is A Return To Our Memory Of Wholeness.

Tv Writers Live Life Of Well-paid, Specialty Prostitutes. We Have A Very Special Skill Set And We Occupy One Of The Higher Floors In The Bordello That Is Writing. We Do A Very Particular Job For A Very Select Clientele.

The Same Creative Force That Generated The Universe Created Your Body. It Is Vibrating With Intelligence And Spirit. It Is Ultimately Sacred And Worthy Of Your Love, Respect And Intention. Take Good Care Of It And Nourish It With The Most Healing, Life-sustaining Foods, Experiences, And Sensory Impressions.

I'm Making A Lot Of Money. I Should Be Paying A Lot More Taxes. I'm Not Paying Taxes At A Rate That Is Even Close To What People Were Paying Under Eisenhower. Do People Think America Wasn't Ascendant And Wasn't An Upwardly Mobile Society Under Eisenhower In The '50s? Nobody Was Looking At The Country Then And Thinking To Themselves, "we're Taxing Ourselves Into Oblivion." Yet There Isn't A Politician With Balls Enough To Tell That Truth Because The Whole System Has Been Muddied By The Rich. It's Been Purchased.

The Trick To Making A Story Matter Is That Every Now And Then, Somebody You Care About Has To Go. If It's Somebody That You Don't Care About, Then It Doesn't Really Have - The Stakes Aren't There. But If You Do That Every Now And Then, Then The Story Matters To People. And There Are Actual Stakes Involved, Emotional Stakes.

To Be Told You've Won A Macarthur Fellowship Is Very Flattering And Gratifying Personally.

Barack Obama's Understanding Of What The Drug War Had Cost The Country Was Meaningful. And Very Quietly In His Second Term, He And Eric Holder Did Make Some Adjustments In Terms Of The Use Of The Department Of Justice, On The Federal Level. You Saw Ratcheting Back Of Drug Prohibition, And Mass Incarceration. You Also Saw, On The Part Of Some Certain States, A Realization That They Followed The War On Drugs To A Useless Place, That They Were Only Doing Damage To Communities, And Bankrupting Budgets With Prison Construction.

When We Were Kids Coming Up, If You Stole Your Dad's Playboy Magazine, That Was About As Much Of An Education As You Were Gonna Get. You Finish Looking At The Centrefold And You Read 'the Playboy Adviser' That Told You About What Stereo To Buy And Something About Sex Which You Didn't Quite Understand, And You Were Still Just As Confused. Now If You're Ten The Entire World Of Human Sexuality, And A Very Misogynistic Version Of That, Is Available To You On A Laptop After A Couple Of Key Strokes. I Think It's Changed The Vernacular In The Way Men Address Women.

It's Been Said That No Man Is A Hero To A Newspaperman, And I Spent Too Many Years As An Ink-stained Wretch.

There Are A Couple Of Ideas For Features That I Would Love To Do. They Happen To Be Comedies.

Baltimore's Often Called The Most Northern Southern Town. It Has A Distinct Essence. It's Definitely Post-industrial, Definitely Rust Belt, Very Working-class. I Grew Up Outside Of Washington, And I Felt I Was Moving To A Completely Different Place When I Moved 30 Miles North Out Of College.

How That Happened - How The Money And The Power Arrayed Itself And Who Got The Share In That, Who Got Cut Out, Who Was Exploited And Who Did The Exploiting - That To Me Is A Story Of The Deuce That's More About Almost The America That We Inhabit Today, More Than Just Merely About Pornography Or Prostitution.

Choices Are Much More Practical And Small When You're Dealing With A Real Story. It's About Execution, It's Not About Content.

The Best I Can Hope For Is That I Might Provoke A Water Cooler Argument Between You And Somebody Else. But It Is Not Journalism. It Doesn't Have The Rigor Of Journalism. It Doesn't Have The Proof Positive That Facts Provide. So It Can Be Readily Dismissed As Mere Propaganda. But I Can Certainly Reach More People.

What Drugs Haven't Destroyed, The War Against Them Has

We Have No Sense Of The Collective Anymore In America. The Response To Katrina Was Proof Positive Of That.

We Either Live Or Die Based On How We Live In Cities, And Our Society Is Either Going To Be Great Or Not Based On How We Perform As Creatures Of The City.

The Mismanagement Of American Newspapering Is Quite Remarkable. But All Of The Fellows Responsible Are Now On A Golf Course In Hilton Head Or Some Such (place), Having Secured Their Bonuses And Golden-parachute Buyouts.

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