Starry night

 

This is what New Zealanders saw from Rakiura/Stewart Island as they gazed up last night.  A physicist at Auckland University says it's nothing more than ejected rocket propellant.  I say Van Gogh wasn't so mad after all.

The right-wing populist who likes to smack people was defeated for president of Colombia by a former leftist guerrilla who attended the funeral of Hugo Chavez.  Rodolfo Hernandez protested that he confused Adolf Hitler with Albert Einstein, the first person ever to do so, but he still got whomped by Gustavo Petro.  

Keep your eye on Ministry of Truth Social tomorrow afternoon as Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling testify on live TV before the House Select Committee.  The Georgia secretary of state and his deputy for elections appeared before a Fulton County grand jury earlier this month and may believe they have nothing left to lose (and a safe house to hole up in).  Will be wild.

According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll, only a third of Americans are following the Select Committee's hearings but nearly two-thirds think they are "fair and impartial."  Nudge nudge -- here is Barry Blitt's drawing of Merrick Garland reviewing footage of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.

  

Yes, the New Yorker.

We still don't know why Robert F. Smith decided to kill three people at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Vestavia, Alabama, but he is a federally licensed gun dealer.  Another "Boomers Potluck" guest hit him with a folding chair and wrestled the gun away.  

June is the Month of the Long Knives for the Texas Republican party.  Dan Crenshaw was called "eyepatch McCain" and "globalist RINO" for taking part in the World Economic Forum.  Another patriot called Ted Cruz "a coward and a liar" who cares more "about the border between Ukraine and Russia" than the one between Texas and Mexico.  He's a globalist, too.  John Cornyn was booed despite only pretending to negotiate a gun control bill, just for talking to them gun-grabbin' Democrats.  The convention voted to kick out the Fort Worth Log Cabin Republicans so there would be no debate when they declared homosexuality "abnormal" along with gender issues and body dysmorphia.  That was the warmup act.  Then came golden oldies condemning the Federal Reserve, income tax, the Equal Rights Amendment, the 1965 Voting Rights Act (what's left of it) and just for the hell of it, should Texas secede?  Yes.  Yes, it should.  Tomorrow.

Joe Biden fell while dismounting his bicycle yesterday, so Trump assured his worried faithful in Nashville, "I make this pledge to you today:  I will never ever ride a bicycle."  This is a pledge I believe he will keep.

Then he posted a doctored video purporting to show him knocking Biden off the bike with a golf ball.  I can't help it, I miss that impish sense of humor.  Let's see if the Secret Service misses it, too.

In a time when most people use social media and email, one person decided to go old school, mailing a   death threat to Adam Kinzinger, his wife and their five-month-old son at their home address.  Yes, even the baby was to be "executed."  You have to love the grandiloquent syntax, in this case implying legally constituted authority.  The letter, addressed to Mrs. Kinzinger, is also deeply religious:  "You and Christian will be joining Adam in hell too!  We [sic] find it blasphemous that you name the son of the devil Christian!"  Interviewed yesterday on ABC News, Kinzinger said, "There's violence in the future...Wake up, America.  Wake up, Republicans, because this is not going to be good for you if you think it is."

Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his Nobel Prize medal for $550,000 with the proceeds going to UNICEF to aid Ukrainian children.  I hope he is still here when the war ends.  Maybe people would hate Elon Musk less if he were to match it, at least.

Today is the first federally acknowledged Juneteenth.  Ironically, it began in Texas.