Butch in the Burgh

YOU🫵'RE 🫵 NE->XT.!! moTHERFUCKER!!!!

I wanted to buy this print but last I checked on his site it was sold out. Here’s his shop though:

Also Triangle is one of my favorites

On this day in 1969, the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon. 🌙 And back on Earth, an estimated 600 million people watched this historic moment live on television—roughly one-fifth of the world’s population at that time! The mission had three crew members: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Collins piloted the craft that would return them to Earth, while Armstrong and Aldrin became the first two people ever to walk the Moon’s surface.

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

Step 1: Remove filters in Reflecting Pool because Obama put them in.

Step 2: Give your criminal neighbor who runs "Greenwater Services" a $20 million no-bid contract to paint the pool.

Step 3: Fill the pool with water from the Potomac River, the phosphates from which cause algae blooms.

Step 4: Freshly sealed pool and extreme heat result in a super scum event

Step 5: Direct National Park Service to dump hydrogen peroxide into the pool which causes the paint to peel.

It sounds funny, silly even, but whenever Jews disagree in this context, it's never entirely about the disagreement; it's about feelings of betrayal over fellow Jews thinking, acting, perceiving, and behaving differently. It's about feelings of insecurity borne of second-guessing your own perspectives. It's about that deep-seated fear, that if That One Group behaves improperly, it will bring the rage of the gentiles down upon us all.

The American Jewish community is in a....profoundly disunited state right now, and we're being deeply toxic to each other on social media; I assume you've seen my own interactions here, in which my coreligionists accuse me of engaging in blood libel and ignoring/downplaying the genocidal violence Hamas imposed on Israeli and other civilians on 10/7/23. It's so easy to take it personally. To get mad. To think "omg please don't post that where the non-Jews can see it now they're going to hate us even more!" But being a modern Jewish historian allows me to take a step back, and remind myself: Jews have never agreed on how to do Judaism in diaspora. We have never even fully agreed on how to do it not in diaspora, but under the governance of a larger empire (see: Chanukah deep lore). This is a normal, established aspect of our historical continuum, and being part of that makes me neither a Good Jew nor a Bad Jew, but just another individual, contributing however I can to this eternal discourse.

It's easy to make "hurrr two Jews three opinions!" jokes, and I have/do. But those jokes aren't the result of some inherent Jewish proclivity towards internecine disagreements; they reflect instead of wide variety of factors Jews must take into account every day as we engage with the rest of the world as a lobal minority.

When I see a post about the history of, say, the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the 90s, and a fellow Jewish person posts OH GOOD WE'RE TALKING ABOUT AN ACTUAL GENOCIDE in response. My first feelings are those of overwhelming fear and embarrassment. Because the gentile who see that will store it in the rhetorical ammo they deploy against all of us.

I am simultaneously living the patterns of Jewish history, while observing their longevity. It's weird, but cool. I think.