Laughter is the Only Way Into My Heart

My entry was the Spite Ensemble I've been working on. I titled it "In Memory of Black Suffragettes".

The script I had for the moderator to read as I modeled:

On August 19, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, stating “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

That should have meant that ALL women had the right to vote, but in reality, Black women, who had long been part of the suffrage movement, and Indigenous women, who inspired it, were once again left behind by their white peers.

Even now, protections once offered by enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been rolled back and we are hurtling backwards to a time where literacy tests and poll taxes kept all but “respectable” people from casting their ballots.

This ensemble was made with turn of the century patterns and an Ankara print the style of would have been available at the time. White was chosen to emulate the outfits worn by Suffragettes of all backgrounds.

After literal hours of deliberation the judges made their decision: I was named Best in Class Journeyman for Presentation and Best in Class _*Master*_ for Workmanship! Usually you have to win 3 awards as Journeyman to move up to Master

And I won Second for Presentation and Best in Class for Workmanship!

Piss in a bathroom stall with the stall door wide open

Continue having an animated phone conversation on handsfree through the entire process of pissing.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This is consistently the case. Creators tend to do their best work when they are in a healthy place and receiving proper treatment and not being self destructive in their efforts to cope. Go figure.

The math on "fund Israel instead of Medicare for All" doesn't math.

The US sends Israel roughly $3.8 billion a year - $3.3 billion baseline under a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), plus the emergency supplementals Congress passed after October 7. The nonpartisan Urban Institute puts Medicare for All at $32-34 trillion over ten years.

That's at least $3.2 trillion per year in new federal spending.

Most people zone out and their brains go to static when they try to understand numbers on this scale - so let's do it visually:

Do you see it, Anon?

Ceasing support for Israel aid won't build an American Universal Healthcare system in the same way that giving up avocado toast won't enable Gen Z to buy a house.

The "fund healthcare with Israel aid" crowd consistently ignores the fact that most of the aid for Israel already goes to Americans.

Israel is required to spend the entire Foreign Military Financing (FMF) amount on American weapons, systems, and defense equipment manufactured and sold by US companies - a requirement the Obama administration tightened.

The money goes to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon. It produces jobs in Alabama and Connecticut.

So...why do we keep hearing this nonsensical association between aid to Israel and the US failing to have universal healthcare?

Antisemitism has always worked by inserting Jews between people and whatever they feel they're owed.

We've seen this before:

The Crusades failed because of military overreach and strategic collapse. Instead of taking responsibility, the Church blamed the Jews, thereby protecting its own authority and giving humiliated crusaders a scapegoat instead of a reckoning.

The Black Death swept Europe because of a bacterial pandemic. Instead of accepting a natural explanation, authorities blamed the Jews for poisoning the wells. This gave terrified populations someone to punish and deflected scrutiny from their own powerlessness.

France's military was humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 because of poor leadership and strategic failure. Instead of holding their own commanders accountable, the French military establishment blamed a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus. This protected the careers and reputations of the actual culprits.

Germany lost World War One because of military collapse and strategic exhaustion. Instead of accepting defeat, the military leadership blamed the Jews for stabbing the army in the back, which shielded the officer class from accountability and planted the seed for the next war.

Weimar Germany experienced hyperinflation because of war reparations and catastrophic fiscal policy. Instead of addressing structural economic failure, politicians blamed Jewish financiers, giving a desperate population an enemy to hate and buying the political class some time.

Tsarist Russia had endemic poverty because of serfdom's aftermath and imperial mismanagement. Instead of reforming their own institutions, the Tsar blamed the Jews for exploiting the peasantry, redirecting revolutionary anger away from the throne and toward the shtetl. Nothing lets off steam like a good pogrom.

American culture has been shaped by industrialization, commercialization, and mass media. Instead of grappling with those forces, cultural conservatives blamed the Jews for controlling Hollywood, neatly avoiding any serious examination of the market forces they themselves championed.

The United States lacks universal healthcare because of lobbying, Senate procedure, and forty years of political failure. Instead of addressing any of that, they blame Israel for eating the budget, letting the actual obstacles off the hook entirely.

The specific grievance changes. The structure doesn't.

Jews make a convenient scapegoat precisely because Jews are a small, visible minority with enough presence in public life to be a plausible explanation, but not enough numbers to outvote the lie.

Blaming Jews is what a society does when it has failed its people and needs to deflect the consequences of that failure. It is the political coward's way to avoid the hard, unglamorous work of building coalitions, passing legislation, and holding their own institutions accountable.