Good news! Benjamin Netanyahu assures everyone that there will *NOT* be a Civil War.

There will be no civil war! The State of Israel is a state of law and according to the law, the Israeli government decides who will be the head of the Shin Bet. Shabbat Shalom.

(Translation provided by Google.)

Ah, that's something we probably need to kick up to one of the grownups.

I *WANT* guest posts.

Any given post of mine has an author's bio at the bottom but here it is: AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

I was expecting a bunch of bad reviews from chuds who hadn't seen the movie but I expected them to be offset by Team Good people reviewing it as a masterpiece (who also hadn't seen it first).

If the latter don't show up, it might be legitimately bad.

I mean, as a movie. I don't mean morally.

The debate over The Department of Education generally just boils down to the name.

"The Department of Good Things has failed in its mission. We should shutter it."
"What? Don't you support Good Things?"

The widely debunked claim that "every education statistic has gone down since the Department of Education was established!" points to a couple of claims as to why it's not true: High School Graduation Rates and College Degrees.

Both of those have gone up since 1979. Indisputably.

Of course, we've discussed the whole "people graduating without being proficient at reading or math" thing a hundred times and college graduation rates have been discussed a little less (but we've discussed Student Loan Forgiveness a bunch... the consensus does seem to be that the degrees aren't worth what the students paid for them).

And we're back to arguing over whether or not we support the idea of Good Things... therefore we should support The Department of Good Things.

Has anybody seen the new Snow White yet?

How is it?

Well, if you want to pretend that you can't tell, I'll let you continue to do so.

But I imagine that it doesn't feel better when you do that.

See? Isn't that better than "but nobody is arguing for open borders!"?

So at least the police reform/defund the police faction has been told that they are losers.

Was it a mistake to run a candidate in 2024 that argued for defunding the police back in 2020?

Because if we can't get people to say "holy crap, we never should have run Kamala", I'm going to say that you're making stronger statements than those that would more accurately describe the facts on the ground.

We'd probably benefit from definitions here. "They're engaging in commerce!" is one definition of communication/cooperation but it strikes me as trivial.

Like, if we'd not find it particularly notable for "the global left" to do the things we're talking about when we say "communication/cooperation", we may be doing the thing where we're complaining about humans but saying that it's "the global right" doing it.

You know, the way that kids these days conflate "entropy" with "capitalism".

I don't even think that arguing "hey, we need one billion immigrants" is necessarily a *BAD* play. "The Haitians are making Ohio better. Here's the factory owner praising how they're better workers than vintage Americans!"

But this whole thing about how we have a massive influx of immigrants and use new and novel ways to get them into communities who don't get a vote on it and then pretend that nothing happened when there are objections is, seriously, going to turn off more people than a full-throated "READ THE STATUE OF LIBERTY POEM AGAIN!!!"

Yeah, maybe that play will work. "Open borders?" you can ask with wide eyes. "But nobody is even pushing for those!"

The only thing that the global right seems to agree upon is that "Open Borders" is not a good policy.

Yeah, yeah. "Nobody is arguing for open borders!" but remember this article from just last month? In an Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning?

As it turns out, the answer is that Denmark's Liberals are against Open Borders.

The answer just might be "abandon open borders as a policy".

Which, you'd think, would be easy if nobody is arguing for it.

Tull has come out with three albums in the last three years!!!

The Zealot Gene in 2022, RökFlöte in 2023, and Curious Ruminant came out TWO WEEKS AGO.

Huh.

If we could allow for "conspiracy theories" to also cover stuff like "the authorities covering stuff up, obfuscating the truth, and opposing the story of what actually happened coming to light by pushing forward narratives that were not accurate", then we'd find ourselves awash in conspiracies.

Better to narrow it down to the point where it only covers stuff like "covid wasn't a deliberate biological weapon released to harm America, it came from a wet market".

Everybody always thinks that their pet conspiracies are like MKULTRA or Operation Mockingbird but most of them are like the conspiracy theory that says that Covid came from a lab.

Email it to me and I'll submit it under guest posts.

If you don't want to do it that way, email Andrew Donaldson and he'll do it.

One of Leonard Cohen's last poems was titled "What is Coming".

what is coming
ten million people
in the street
cannot stop
what is coming
the American Armed Forces
cannot control
the President
of the United States
and his counselors
cannot conceive
initiate
command
or direct
everything
you do
or refrain from doing
will bring us
to the same place
the place we don't know

your anger against the war
your horror of death
your calm strategies
your bold plans
to rearrange
the middle east
to overthrow the dollar
to establish
the 4th Reich
to live forever
to silence the Jews
to order the cosmos
to tidy up your life
to improve religion
they count for nothing
you have no understanding
of the consequences
of what you do
oh and one more thing
you aren't going to like
what comes after
America

I sent a link to this essay to my EMF. I did not bother sending one to my JMF.

Yeah, my moment for that was "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in the cookie aisle.

"Why are they playing Joy Division?", I asked. Then I got depressed. Then I bought some Fudge Stripes.

Ironically enough, today marks the 54th Anniversary of the release of Aqualung.

March 19th, 1971.

Man, no wonder they wanted to keep this under wraps!

Misogyny.

Duh.

Be careful out there. I've seen a number of people saying "holy cow, I can't believe the files contain (risible claim)!" and a screenshot of a document without naming it.

I've seen a couple of these where it was a document released back in 2023.

One time I even saw a guy claim "document #(number here) says (risible claim)!" and a screenshot of the document and I went to the website and looked up that specific document and, wouldn't you know it, it was all about Cuba and whatnot and had nothing to do with (risible claim).

So check and double-check.