Welcome to Sunday, June 7, 2027, and National Boone Day, explained thusly:

National Boone Day is observed each year on June 7 to commemorate the day frontiersman Daniel Boone first began exploring the valleys and forests of the present-day Bluegrass State of Kentucky on June 7, 1769. Boone founded the village of Boonesborough, which is one of the first American settlements west of the Appalachians.

Here’s a painting on Daniel Boone’s Wikipedia page called “Boone’s First View of Kentucky” by William Tylee Ranney (1849; Boone died in 1820).  I assume he’s the person pointing in the picture.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Iran has sent drones firing on (they claim) American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, violating the ceasefire. But it’s not clear—since the U.S. also struck Iran—who fired first:

 Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones toward Bahrain and Kuwait early Saturday, Bahrain’s government said, adding that they were intercepted. It called on Tehran to immediately cease attacks on Gulf neighbors that it deemed a “serious escalation.”

Iran’s foreign ministry said the U.S. early Saturday attacked surveillance facilities on Qeshm Island and near Sirik that it said were used to protect borders and “ensure the security of navigation in international waters.” Tehran called the attack a violation of the fragile ceasefire.

The latest exchange of fire came as the Trump administration pressed Iran to make a deal to end the war that has strained the global economy and threatened a hunger crisis in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries.

The U.S. military earlier said it shot down several Iranian missiles and drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf Arab allies, and struck some of the Islamic Republic’s coastal surveillance radar sites in response.

“The attack drones posed an immediate threat to regional maritime traffic,” U.S. Central Command said on social media. It confirmed it hit radar sites, including an island in the strait, “to defend against further attacks.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it targeted the Ali Al Salem air base, which hosts U.S. forces in Kuwait, and the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. The U.S. military said there were no reports of harm to U.S. personnel.

It looks as if it going to go on this way for a while, and if there’s a “cease-fire” in progress, well, it’s a very tenuous one. But I can’t imagine that this is going to make the Gulf states like Iran more or try to expel U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.

*There’s a lot of attention in the news to Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Maine, who will likely be facing incumbent Susan Collins in a crucial Senate race. He now avers that his past is being “weaponized.”  I guess that means that his past, which is extremely checkered with numerous scandals, is being brought up to question him.  So what else is new? His past missteps and other bad stuff include sexting to repeated women while he was married, a Nazi-ish death’s-head tattoo that he’s now effaced (but claims it has nothing to do with the SS), violent behavior towards girlfriends, and offensive and obscene social-media posts. Even the Washington Post has an op-ed called “Platner is a strange reason for Democrats to dump moral standards,” with the subtitle, “There isn’t much for liberals to gain from replacing Susan Collins, the Senate’s most liberal Republican.” And the WSJ has called him a “mounting liability for Democrats.” Nevertheless, Dems like Bernie Sanders have endorsed him vigorously because, after all, he’s a Democrat.

From the first link (NYT):

Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, moved to quell mounting Democratic anxieties about his candidacy on Friday, telling supporters in a defiant speech that his past behavior was being “weaponized” by his political opponents.

A day after The New York Times reported that three women — a conservative and two Democrats — who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner described volatile and “toxic” relationships, Mr. Platner addressed a crowd at a theater in Bar Harbor, expressing confidence that Maine voters would stick by him.

“When politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back,” Mr. Platner said. “The state of Maine raised me, and the state of Maine saved me, and to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”

Mr. Platner’s appearance came at a tense moment in one of the year’s premier Senate races. With just days left before Maine’s primary on Tuesday, revelations about Mr. Platner’s personal history have caused escalating discomfort within his party, while drawing intensifying attacks from Republicans.

The rally also took place less than a week after The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had sought to warn his campaign last year that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.

From the Washington Post (an op-ed):

Maine voters are free to support Platner, of course, as are progressive political commentators — notwithstanding the tattoo, the lying about it, the lying about his home loan, the extramarital sexting and everything else. But it’s a strange race to jettison moral standards for.

Platner is running against Susan Collins, the most moderate Republican in the Senate. She supports abortion rights. She voted to confirm Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and against Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Collins opted to convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. If her side had prevailed, he would have been disqualified from the presidency.

People who are significantly to the senator’s left may well prefer Platner’s stated views. But even then, you have to wonder about the practical advantage they would gain from his replacing Collins. His presence in the Senate wouldn’t make single-payer health care much more likely to become law. Congress is not going to remove two conservative justices from the Supreme Court, regardless of what Platner is telling voters. But perhaps people who believe in these ideas think it’s important to have one more senator making the argument for them even if the ideas aren’t going anywhere.

And from the WSJ:

Morris Katz, a New York-based ad maker who helped recruit Platner, said the Democratic Party needed candidates who come from outside traditional politics. Some will have complicated backgrounds.

“If you believe that we should have people who never before thought they’d run for office,” he said, “they will have said things that they will have regretted, especially as a new generation that’s entire history of every thought they’ve had is recorded on social media.”

Genevieve McDonald, a former political director for Platner’s campaign who resigned after his Reddit posts became public, said the campaign failed to conduct an adequate vetting operation. “This was a large part of why I quit,” she said. “I trusted Graham and his campaign to have done oppo research and cleared him.”

Platner’s social-media posts have come up on the campaign trail, with some voters pressing him about his comments suggesting that women “take responsibility” for avoiding sexual assault by not getting drunk.

Complicated background indeed. But surely there is someone in Maine not tarnished by all these missteps. And it is his campaign’s fault that he wasn’t vetted properly. I’m just glad I don’t live in Maine. And if the Republican candidate had a background like Platner, do you think the Democrats would ignore it, saying, “Well, that was all in the past. People change.”  Not in our lifetime!

*David J. Rush, a former CIA official who was caught with $40 million in gold bars, is now revealed to have gotten by bars by fabricating and funding a secret intelligence mission, then funneling the gold to him. From the WaPo:

The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation.

David J. Rush, who was arrested last month and charged with one count of theft of public money, constructed what is known as a “special access program,” a sort of black box for the most secret intelligence operations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Even intelligence personnel with the highest security clearance cannot access an individual SAP, as they are known, without specific authorization.

The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said the criminal probe found that Rush “read in,” or initiated, two colleagues into the highly secretivesham program, effectively cultivating them as perhaps unwitting accomplices andpreventing them from talking to others about it. Hepersuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the program via a government contract that was also fraudulent, they said.

“He made up a contract,” one of the people said.

. . .The account of those familiar with the criminal probe appears to raise serious questions about secrecy guardrails and vetting at the CIA.

It remains unclear, for example, how Rush could single-handedly create a “black box” for a fictional spy program without sign-off from his superiors. It is also unclear whether the two colleagues Rush brought into the fake program knew it was fraudulent.

One of the people familiar with the probe said Rush’s fake program involved “continuity of government” operations, or programs to keep the U.S. federal government running in the event of nuclear war, natural disasters or other catastrophes.

Rush apparently used the fake government continuity program and the contract to persuade a government defense contractor to purchase large amounts of gold, this person said.

Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Clearly someone’s not doing their job at the CIA, though Rush did get caught. But it’s amazing to think that he would evade that forever!

*This is one reason why I consider the Times of Israel the best source of news on that country, for it calls out bad stuff about the country. The latest is an article called, “9 Palestinians wounded in setller rampage in Huwara; IDF soldier seen beating man.”

Nine Palestinians were wounded Saturday in a settler attack on the northern West Bank town of Huwara, Palestinian media reported, as footage from the scene showed masked assailants and at least one soldier beating Palestinians and damaging property, as clashes spread to nearby areas.

WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said the wounded include a local councilman who was injured by shrapnel to the leg, four other people who were beaten, and another four who were tear-gassed.

Images showed that the masked settlers arrived at Huwara in pickup trucks.

The Israel Defense Forces said that soldiers and Border Police officers were dispatched to several sites in Huwara after receiving reports of “suspected theft of livestock belonging to Israeli civilians,” and to “remove the Israeli civilians and the livestock from the village and prevent confrontations in the area.”

Later, the military said, “several rioters arrived in the area of the village and violent clashes developed, including stone-throwing and the use of clubs between Israeli civilians and Palestinians.”

One surveillance video showed an Israeli soldier and a group of settlers beating two Palestinian men. The footage showed the soldier, seen in full military gear, repeatedly punching one of the Palestinians. The group was then seen leaving the area, leaving behind the two wounded Palestinians.

. . .The military said that it was “aware of footage showing an IDF soldier using violence against a Palestinian,” and that the soldier’s actions are “serious and inconsistent with the values of the IDF.”

“Once the soldier is identified, he will be subject to disciplinary proceedings, and appropriate command and disciplinary measures will be taken in accordance with the findings,” the army said, adding that it had launched an investigation into the incident.

Here’s a tweet from this site showing the beating, including an IDF soldier as one of the “beaters”.  (There is a long English translation.) And yes, the soldier should be disciplined (including dishonorable dicharge, if they have that), and jailed or punished for assault. The settlers, too, should be identified and disciplined.  Both the IDF and the Israeli press are not hiding this, but can you imagine a headline in a Gaza newspaper saying something like “Hamas soldier shoots Gazan civilian for leaving apartment after Israel warned that it would be bombed”?

תיעוד מטורף מהיום בחווארה.

חייל תוקף פלסטיניים בצוותא עם מתנחלים בכפר חווארה.

עפ״י הסהר האדום מהמקום פונה פלסטיני עם פגיעת ראש שמצבו מוגדר קשה.
.

עשרות מתנחלים רעולי פנים תקפו ארבעה כפרים שונים בסמוך ליצהר החל מהשעה 11:00, תוך שהם מיידים אבנים, מציתים רכוש, תוקפים תושבים… pic.twitter.com/iidq2XpwDH

— Matan Golan (@MatanGolanPhoto) June 6, 2026

*Reader Pyers calls our attention to a new interview with Richard Dawkins in the Times of London, called “Richard Dawkins: ‘AI chatbots are so insightful—what more could you want?‘”

Dawkins, 85, has a reputation as a ferocious dogmatist (there was a time when it was obligatory for newspaper interviewers to refer to Dawkins as “Darwin’s rottweiler”), but in person he is mild-mannered, earnest and abstracted. He is smartly turned out in a shirt and navy jacket, the uniform of his generation of academics. The patrician accent — product of public schools first in Zimbabwe then back in England — also marks him out as belonging to another time. Mentally and physically he is well preserved. The coif of silver hair is perhaps a little thinned. And his tolerance for small talk (famously slight) has dwindled almost to nothing — we get from “hello” to the nature of consciousness remarkably quickly. The impression is of muted, carefully concentrated energy.

. . . . The title of a compilation of appearances recently released on YouTube, Destroying Religion for 4 HOURS Straight, attests to his undiminished argumentative vigour. He is also — and I hope any octogenarians reading this feel thoroughly ashamed of their indolence — writing his first novel.

. . . The occasion of our meeting is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, which launched the 35-year-old Dawkins, then an Oxford zoology lecturer, into public life. The Selfish Gene (I don’t think anyone really quibbles about this any more) is one of the greatest popular science books. And where most scientists live to see their work superseded, The Selfish Gene has endured. Having re-read it, Dawkins says, “I’m surprised how little it needs to be changed.

He also retains what might be characterised as a childlike literalism about the truth. He has never accustomed himself to the grown-up equivocations and evasions with which most of us ease our way through life. Indeed, they infuriate him. In his memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, he records his childhood indignation at the preacher who told him faith could move mountains, forgetting “to make the distinction between metaphor and reality clear to a gullible child”. He writes disapprovingly of such people: “I sometimes wonder whether they even realise there is a distinction. Many of them don’t seem to think it matters much.”

Dawkins, to put it mildly, dislikes having to humour other people’s illusions. His most famous controversies are about God, who got a memorable drubbing in the multimillion-selling The God Delusion, published in 2006. Since then, more battles have been joined. In the irrational 2020s, a stickler for the strict truth is never going to find himself short of foes. Dawkins is contemptuous of Donald Trump, a “conspicuously anti-intellectual philistine thug”. He has also made a brace of new enemies on the progressive left with its truth-bending tendency to put feelings before science. He has little time for the idea that, “If you say you’re a woman, you are a woman,” he says. “That way madness lies.” If we go on like this “words cease to have meaning”.

There’s a bit about the kerfuffle in which Richard engaged Claude in a conversation and made a statement that he now regrets, but that’s peanuts given the sweep of the man’s accomplishments:

He says: “I rather regret [the phrase] ‘you may not know you’re conscious but you bloody well are’.” He thinks “a better thing to have said would be, ‘What more do you want? What more do you expect?’” The thought he keeps returning to is that AIs are “so intuitive and insightful… what more would you want from them to prove that they are human?”

. . . To me the most interesting thing about Dawkins’s chatbot is that it has been reading his novel. Will he divulge what he’s been writing about? “I don’t know what the publisher would think,” he says, but, “Why not?” The book’s heroine is a scientist named Rosalind “who conceives the idea of bringing back to life Homo erectus”, the humanlike ancestor species that lived two million years ago. Rosalind “insists on being the surrogate mother” to two Homo erectus babies. This is (understandably) “very controversial”.

The purpose of “the second half of the book is to explore the impact on humanity, society, morality, ethics, politics of having an intermediate between what we call animals and what we call humans”. A thorny issue “because our present morality is so species-ist”.

Eventually the twins fall in love with each other, causing a scandal because their relationship looks like incest (actually they are biologically unrelated). Dawkins has been planning out the linguistic and sensory world of Homo erectus too. “They can do nouns and verbs, but not adjectives, and not recursive grammar,” he says. Smell is important to them so instead of “expressing a liking for somebody they say: ‘You smell apples.’” He is “still trying to work out how to end the novel”. One option could be a Romeo and Juliet-style tragedy.

. . . There are public intellectuals who, by their mid-eighties, have safely retired from public controversy and are content to be treated as monuments, admired for glories of half a century ago. Dawkins refuses to retreat behind a red-velvet rope and behave like a museum exhibit. Fifty years on from his entry into public life he is still thinking and arguing as energetically as ever. To those of us who owe him all our curiosity about science this seems to me to be something to be glad about — whether you always agree with him or not.

Indeed.  There is a genre of human beings that treats Dawkins as an Antichrist, as if everything he says and does is reprehensible. Those people are morons.  Yes, he’s made missteps, but to be human is to make missteps. Weigh those against what the man has accomplished, particularly in getting people educated about and interested in evolution, and you’ll see where the needle rests.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has an evolutionary question:

Hili: Is a human more closely related to a chimpanzee or a cat?
Andrzej: Depends which human. Some are nearest to a baboon.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy człowiek jest bardziej spokrewniony z szympansem, czy z kotem?
Ja: To zależy który człowiek, niektórym najbliżej do pawiana.

*******************

From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group:

From Things With Faces:

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Masih, who calls out a UN representative for truckling and groveling before an Iranian official:

Masih @AlinejadMasih is right to call out the body language. This is not mere diplomatic courtesy. It reflects a craven orientalism, blind to the social context of Iran’s gender battle and to the symbolic meaning of such gestures before a regime that polices women’s bodies.

I… https://t.co/9a1UcfSImW

— Kian Tajbakhsh (@k_tajbakhsh) June 6, 2026

From Keith, which I reposted with a comment:

This situation is vanishingly rare: honeybees usually leave the venom sac behind with the stinger, incurring a fatal wound. Stinging honeybees almost invariably die,, which the tweet doesn’t say. https://t.co/yaIoFs06t5

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 6, 2026

The Number Ten cat thanks the man who adopted him out to Downing Street. That looks like a young Larry:

Anthony Head was an Ambassador for Battersea Dogs and Cats home for more than two decades. Thanks for everything Tony x pic.twitter.com/3koD9hWExF

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) June 5, 2026

Two from my feed. First, sound up; this is what Tuvan throat-singing sounds like. (I may have posted this ages ago.)

German singer Anna-Maria Hefele stunned the world with a viral video showcasing polyphonic overtone singing.pic.twitter.com/vYe2bnwMCG

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 6, 2026

A very tame bobcat! “But he’s soft. . . . ”

Me bringing my boyfriend home to meet my parents😂🥰 pic.twitter.com/ed7SQLcBOn

— This Account Makes You Happy (@FeelYouHappy) June 6, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy was gassed very soon after his train pulled into Auschwitz. He was ten years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-06-07T09:42:48.623Z

And two from Dr. Cobb, about to go off to France and Switzerland.  Look the first one up; it all ends badly for Earth:

What's going to happen in the future and when? A timeline of the far future. 🧪

— Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) (@drspacejunk.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T01:57:31.664Z

Matthew loves “mistake” cartoons like this one, and he says, “Tricky but I got all 13 (two are very subtle).”  Sure enough, I got only 11. 

An observation test for your inner 8-year-old. Can you spot the 13 mistakes in the picture?From Treasure magazine, 1965Official answers coming soon(Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one?)

— Helen Day (@lbflyawayhome.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T07:57:38.204Z

Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 6, shabbos for Jewish cats, Convocation Day at the University of Chicago (there’s a livestream at the link; festivities start at 9 a.m.), the anniversary of my late parents, and the anniversary of D-Day, the day the Allies landed on Normandy in 1944: the beginning of the end for the Nazis.  Here’s an actual photograph of the landing called “Into the jaws of death,” with the Wikipedia caption:

Into the Jaws of Death by Robert F. Sargent.  Original caption: Down the ramp of a Coast Guard landing barge Yankee soldiers storm toward the beach-sweeping fire of Nazi defenders in the D-Day invasion of the French Coast. Troops ahead may be seen laying flat under the deadly machinegun resistance of the Germans.

This was in fact at Omaha Beach, the deadliest of the beaches for landing, and the one depicted in the opening scene of Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (see below)

Here’s the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan,” depicting the landing on Omaha. Veterans who were there praise its accuracy, though landings were not this bloody on other beaches. WARNING: it’s bloody!

It’s also the day the Belmont Stakes are run, National Applesauce Cake Day, National Black Bear Day, National Bubbly Day, National Churro Day, National Pineapple Day, and and Atheist Pride Day.

Here’s a young pineapple I photographed in 2022 in a botanical park in the Canary Islands:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Speaking of graduation here, the news is now saying that 14 U.S. colleges cost more than $100,000 per year to attend starting this fall, including fees, tuition, room and board, books, and other requisites. Business Insider has a list of the 30 most expensive colleges, and guess what? The University of Chicago is the second highest, though the figures given are for this year, and include tuition and fees at $79,395 and room and board: $21,414 for a total of $100,809. This fall will be more, but realize that U.S. students don’t really pay that much because of scholarships and the like. Chicago also has America’s highest tuition; Harvey Mudd is the most expensive  At $102,312, but tuition is lower than Chicago and room and board costs more.  Most of the colleges on the list are small and elite, and Harvard is not to be seen.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal tells us “Why Israel’s top brass thinks they’ve already won the war.”

t’s Friday, June 5, and Hezbollah has officially rejected the ceasefire. Two days after Jerusalem and Beirut agreed to a conditional pause, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem dismissed the deal as a “surrender,” vowing to maintain fire on northern Israel as long as strikes in Lebanon continue. This hardline stance certainly jeopardizes the “pilot zones” intended for the Lebanese Armed Forces to deploy. However, it hasn’t shifted the calculus in Tel Aviv; for the IDF’s top brass, the book on the terror organization has already largely been closed.

On the streets, it’s easy to spot the sourness and bitterness regarding the events on the northern front, from the children running to bomb shelters, to the devastating news from the drone fields across the border, all the way to slamming the brakes on an attack in Beirut. The difficult conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t help the feeling that there is a plan, either. These feelings do not reach the upper floors of the Kirya, Israel’s Pentagon. At the top of the military, they speak of an achievement unseen in years, and of an opportunity for peace and quiet for many long years. Reconciling these two pictures is impossible, but describing them is.

The IDF’s top brass is convinced that Hezbollah is a semi-dismantled organization that has absorbed the hardest blow in its history. It had 30,000 fighters on Oct. 6, 2023; since then, 8,000 have been killed and about the same number wounded. “Even a jihadist enemy is dying for a ceasefire.”

The chief of staff, for example, said in closed discussions that he is in favor, under the following conditions: One, Hezbollah’s withdrawal beyond the Litani River. Two, the destruction of all its infrastructure, this time not by the impotent Lebanese army but by an Israeli-American mechanism. Three, an IDF presence on the Yellow Line, which includes, for example, the infamous Beaufort Castle.

. . . It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a gap between the harsh public sentiment and the sweeping optimism at the top. How long? Twenty years minus two months, at the end of the Second Lebanon War. Back then, the public was right that the war was a dismal failure and Hezbollah had grown stronger; hopefully, this time the decision-makers are right.

And some news about women in the IDF:

Israeli special forces are navigating through broken shards as yet another glass ceiling shatters. Yesterday, the IDF announced that for the first time in history, a woman has graduated from the incredibly intensive special forces course for the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal)—Israel’s equivalent to Delta Force. She is now slated to join the unit’s operational activities.

As part of a pilot program launched in December 2024, this soldier spent 18 months enduring one of the most grueling training pipelines in the world to join Sayeret Matkal. Internal reports have revealed that certain entry thresholds were adjusted for women and that she bypassed the standard selection phase; still, her graduation remains a significant achievement. Step away from the broader debate over women in combat and you are left with a simple truth: she endured immense physical and mental strain, she passed the tests the IDF applied, and she earned her spot.

. . . This groundbreaking soldier joins a growing legacy of female combat heroes in the IDF. Her milestone echoes the bravery seen on October 7, when seven female tank crew members fought Hamas militants continuously for 17 hours. That battle marked the first time in modern military history that an all-female armored unit engaged in active combat, successfully eliminating roughly 50 terrorists. Those warriors—and the IDF’s newest special forces graduate—prove that when the nation needs them most, women can, and will, hold the line.

When I was in Israel, I was always impressed to see women in uniform—and a lot of them. Each Israeli woman, save Arabs and ultra-Orthodox, must spend two years in the military—one year less than the three required for men (a difference based on reproductive biology). Here’s a photo I took in Jerusalem in September, 2023. The might have been police rather than IDF soldiers, but they have the weapons and Jerusalem’s Old City, after all, is not the world’s safest place.  Note that it’s on the Via Dolorosa.

*Bypassing filibuster rules and using the “budget reconciliation” process, the Senate just passed a Trump-approved bill appropriating $70 billion to fund both ICE and the border patrol.  You may recall that this funding was the sticking point that shut down part of the government earlier this year.

The Senate passed legislation early Friday to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies after intense bipartisan backlash over a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund threatened to derail the bill.

Republicans managed to push through the $70 billion legislation, which would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term, on a 52-47 vote after weeks of delays.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was the only Republican to vote against the final package, which was also opposed by all Democrats. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., missed the vote.

Murkowski criticized the use of the budget reconciliation process, which allows senators to advance legislation related to taxes and spending with a simply majority vote rather than the usual 60-vote threshold needed to overcome legislative filibusters.

“I believe very strongly that we needed to fund ICE and CBP, but to completely bypass regular order and the appropriations process by funding for three and a half years, to me … it takes it out of the process that we have always looked to for funding our agencies,” Murkowski said.

She added that she also “had a problem with” including the “anti-weaponization” fund — a proposed settlement fund intended for payments to Americans who are allegedly targeted by the federal government — in the package. The payout fund was created by the Trump administration as part of the settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the IRS for the leak of his tax returns.

The bill includes$38.6 billion for ICE, $22.6 billion for the Border Patrol, $5 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and $108.5 million for child exploitation investigations.

It does not include security funding for the White House ballroom, or any guardrails on the creation of the pot of money seen by Democrats and some Republicans as a “slush fund” to funnel taxpayer money to potentially pay Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies.

The final vote, shortly before 5 a.m., followed an 18-hour “vote-a-rama” during which senators could offer amendments. Senators from both parties proposed 29 amendments and motions before voting on final passage, with some Republicans supporting amendments that broke with Trump’s priorities.

I don’t know much about the final bill and can’t offer comment save that like nearly all bills, it was decided on a vote almost eleanly split between the parties.

*In “Awakenings,” the Washington Post‘s religious newsletter I’ve subscribed to, a doctor describes how, as a nonbeliever, he came to God—through cancer. (I don’t have a link.) The doctor is John V. Campo, described as “a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

As an academic physician, trained first in pediatrics and then psychiatry, a field highly skeptical of religious faith, I was unprepared for a transcendent experience that followed what I will call a housecleaning misadventure last spring. I have since come to view my previous skepticism of religious experience — one that prevails across much of medicine — as something that can impair doctors’ understanding of patients and their needs.

. . . . Later that week, I awoke in the middle of the night, my wife sleeping quietly beside me. My mind was filled with a message that felt like it came from outside me, in words that were not my own: “Someday your body will fail you, and all you will have is me. It will be enough.” I pulled a piece of paper from my nightstand and wrote the words down.

Several months later, after a long walk on the beach during a family vacation, the symptoms I had while cleaning our shower recurred. It was a focal seizure, as I would later learn. An MRI scan showed a mass in the right posterior frontal lobe of my brain, abutting the motor strip. It was a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor with a poor prognosis. Although I had noticed some facial weakness and a droopy eyelid on my left side while watching an interview I had done on a news program earlier that year, my wife and I dismissed it as part of getting older.

Glioblastomas are deadly: the five-year survival rate is about 6%, with a median survival time after diagnosis of 12-18 months.  And so Campo gradually accepted God:

Whether this reflects a newfound stigma is hard to say, but taking our patients seriously requires physicians to explore issues of ultimate concern, suggesting that a spiritual history should be an expected component of any comprehensive clinical evaluation.

I have never been asked about my “spirituality” or “religious beliefs” by any physician, and I don’t buy the need to ask. Campo reveals that he’s a believer here:

One problem I faced was my belief that knowledge of God could be arrived at via the intellect, or not at all. The folly of this attitude would have been apparent to the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who on the night of Nov. 23, 1654, had a transcendent experience that he recorded on a scrap of paper.

One portion of that text read: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of philosophers and scholars.” Pascal did not meet God by constructing a proof for divine existence; he encountered God unexpectedly in the middle of the night.

Such a moment of sudden revelation or insight is often referred to as an epiphany, derived from the Greek “epipháneia,” meaning appearance or manifestation. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults report having such experiences. Discounting these occurrences as purely subjective has potential to limit practitioners’ connection with patients in medicine and psychiatry.

My story isn’t complete, but the words that came to me in the quiet of the night are true enough: Someday my body will fail. Indeed, that process has already begun. Following a craniotomy and partial surgical resection of the tumor, along with radiation and chemotherapy, I have experienced changes in sensation and strength on the left half of my body. Although the remaining words of the message contain some mystery, I’m hopeful and confident that the love of God surrounding me “will be enough.”

It appears that Dr. Campo has found God, and through experience alone, though had he not had a brain tumor I wonder if he would have “found” God.  This newsletter, like the New York Times’s “Believing” newsletter, is one way that a paper can osculate faith without having to do so on its main pages. And you’ll never seen nonbelief touted in such newsletters.

*Nellie Bowles is back writing TGIF’s for the Free Press, and her news-and-snark column this week is called “TGIF: I would never have forgotten my drugs.” As usual, I will steal a few items. She begins it by saying, “No, I will not be commenting on 60 Minutes other than to say that there are 11,492,640 minutes until I am 60. Do with that what you will, Puck.”

→ But Trumpo giveth and Trumpo taketh away. He classes up the city with a deep clean of the fountains, and then he builds a giant UFC fight arena in front of the White House. He’s now suggesting that the White House UFC fight arena should be permanent, like the Eiffel Tower. This week he’s whipping out posters showing that after he gets his excavators in there, the Lincoln Memorial Reflection Pool is going to be bigger than a skyscraper. Just like the Founders intended.

→ Them’s fake oysters: Graham Platner [the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine] is the flower that keeps on blooming. First, the part about him that people love most: He put a huge Nazi tattoo on his chest, the one that honors only the finest concentration camp guards. At this stage in the antisemitism cycle, that’s a plus for the average voter. Now to the negatives: According to his financial disclosures, our oysterman is—well, let’s just say he’s all shell and no belly. He’s all fringe and no gills, if you know what I mean. According to last year’s disclosure he made only $3,000 from his stipend as a town harbor master, which sounds more like a position in a frat house. As far as his oyster farm, for which he does not take a salary, his biggest client is his mom (cute) and almost all of his income seems to come from disability checks. He said he bought his house thanks to the VA, but it was actually thanks to a few hundred thousand dollars from his dad. I mean, guys, he went to Hotchkiss and did the richest thing ever, which is stop going to class—he was subsequently expelled! Just because he grew a beard and talks like a burly man instead of gay-like does not mean he isn’t still one of us. Your oysterman’s a debutante with a lemonade stand.

Then came the really bad news: The married man has an account on Kik. And he’d been messaging with “up to six” women prior to launching his Senate bid, his campaign said. Which is a kind of weird way to phrase it, like it’s some sort of quota to hit. Like he’s putting up infidelity numbers “in the six range.” Oh, also: The account was still online as of three days ago, though the campaign claims that Platner stopped his Kik activity when the campaign started. Which I, for one, think is very mature.

Can’t the Democrats find somebody NORMAL to run? If I were a Democrat in Maine, I’d be hard pressed to vote for this joker!

Watch the two videos to which Nellie links in this last item:

→ The killing of Henry Nowak: Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old in Southampton, UK, was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa. Vickrum’s brother then called the cops and said something brilliant. He said that they had just been “attacked racially by some white person.” Holy mackerel! A racism!!!! Every cop in the UK was called up for service. Then, when the police got there, Henry was weak, on the ground, saying to them over and over: “I’ve been stabbed.” And: “I can’t breathe.” In bodycam footage released this week, the police casually note that he has a mouthful of blood but don’t believe he’s been stabbed. “You’ve been stabbed? Don’t think you have, mate,” a cop says coldly. They don’t even look! They focus on Vickrum to make sure he’s okay, and he shows them a little scuff on his cheek. Poor thing! Then they force Henry to sit up, and cuff and drag him across the gravel. Henry Nowak eventually falls silent, unresponsive as a cop reads him his rights. “His pupils aren’t even reacting,” an officer says in the video, shining a light into his dead face, sounding more annoyed than worried, like of course this lazy racist can’t even be bothered to move his pupils a little. Typical.

The video is hard to watch but I do think you must, and also his father’s statement. As of June 1 (the stabbing happened in December of last year), the killing had received very, very little coverage. The New York Times eventually covered the story this week, begrudgingly, only as an event that’s been “increasingly politicized,” probably by bad, racist actors, like what Henry was said to be, by his stabber. You see, he died maybe racistly, is their argument, so really, could you even call it a stabbing? More like a self-inflicted wound, they’d say. You really can kill anyone you want if you say they did a racism. Fun to consider your options, and good to know for the next time you get cut off in traffic. Here’s how Sky News covered it:

When you are stabbed, you must die quietly in those handcuffs. Stop speculating about it or we’re going to tell the police watchdog on you. It means nothing. It signifies nothing. “I can’t breathe” was an obvious George Floyd copycat attempt. That rallying cry is already taken, mate.

Oh, one more:

→ Crimes against heterosexuality: A Mauritanian man allegedly entered the U.S. illegally in 2023 and then claimed asylum on the basis of being gay, a crime in his home country. Asylum granted, get in here ya Martian! But. . . oh no. Was he really gay? According to authorities, he was exposed as a fraud after marrying the sheriff’s stepdaughter in Portland, Indiana, where he’d been working as a corrections officer! Okay, now this is actually starting to seem like an awesome country song. (We covered an almost identical story to this just a little while back in TGIF! As a real gay, I will always track fake gays.)

As of this week the man is reportedly being held at an ICE detention facility in Indiana (as all heterosexuals should be), and is fighting deportation. He just had to go for the sheriff’s daughter. Couldn’t he have extinguished his unnatural, unholy desires with someone not related to the sheriff? Straight people, why are you like this? It sounds like a Pornhub title on page 14: Fake-gay refugee sneaks around with police boss’s hot daughter. But on a serious note, why do we only let in gay migrants? Everyone in Mauritania wants to be in Sonoma, California, instead! That’s life. I’m not saying don’t let gay men in; I’m saying what if there are other metrics we might consider in deciding who from Mauritania to let in? Maybe a points system where being gay gives you a few points, but other things count too? Just like college admissions!

*The very right-wing Washington Free Beacon has a report about the embrace of “indigenous knowledge” by California, involving lots of dosh paid for useless remedies,

The federal government’s Medicaid program is paying Native American shamans in California $826 a day to perform ancient rituals such as drum circles and spiritual dances to treat drug and alcohol addicts. The alternative treatments are part of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom’s embrace of “indigenous knowledge,” a pseudoscience that claims Native Americans have mystical healing powers that transcend the realm of traditional medicine.

The Biden Department of Health & Human Services gave its approval in October 2024 for California to reimburse Native American “Traditional Healers” with federal Medicaid dollars to treat addicts by drawing on their innate knowledge of ancestral healing rites. The treatments are an effort to combat alcohol and drug addiction in the Native American community, which has a significantly higher rate of substance use disorder than the general population.

Since then, 21 Indian Health Care Providers across the state have enrolled in the program, with the California Department of Health Care Services offering $826 per day to unlicensed “Traditional Healers” and “Natural Helpers” to host spiritual ceremonies, rituals, herbal remedies, and musical drum and dancing therapy for addicts.

But there’s little evidence these ancestral rituals are effective in helping Native Americans and other patients to recover from their drug and alcohol addiction, with some studies showing the alternative treatments may actually be harmful. One study reviewed by the National Institutes of Health found that a significant portion of participants in a Native American Drum Circle study reported drinking more alcohol than usual after participating in the intervention. Another study found that the use of Native American Sweat Lodge Ceremonies to treat alcoholics was mostly ineffective.

The California Department of Health Care Services has crafted the “Traditional Healers” program with a set of lax oversight rules that could render the program vulnerable to fraud and make it a target of the Trump administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. The task force has identified billions of dollars’ worth of federal government contracts that have been awarded to potentially fraudulent businesses, many of which are in the medical sector. Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance, who heads the task force, announced that the federal government has frozen $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California, in part because the state is not taking fraud seriously, he said.

“We’re talking about taxpayer-funded drum circles,” a senior White House official told the Washington Free Beacon. “Someone in the Biden administration said, ‘That sounds like a good idea.’ It’s disgusting. These were the experts running around telling everyone how much smarter they are. And they’re using taxpayer dollars for drum circles.”

They note that the “drum and dancer” healers need not have any qualifications to be eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. This is your taxpayer money being used for what can only be described as quackery.  It of course reflects the sacralization of indigenous people, regarded as possessing knowledge different from but as efficacious as that used in modern medicine.  That’s wrong. You might say that there’s a placebo effect involved, with Native Americans “healing” their own kind, but not only is the evidence against that, but I for one don’t want my taxes spent on placebos.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the kitchen is the center of the cats’ world:

Hili: He’s doing something in the kitchen.
Szaron: I’ll go check.

In Polish:

Hili: On coś robi w kuchni.
Szaron. Pójdę sprawdzić.

*******************

From TherionArms, another medieval letter (I love the captions of these things:

From Things With Faces:

From Stacy:

Masih reposted this tweet from a woman who has her own “X” account.  Translation from the Farsi:

A short excerpt from my speech at the “Vienna Court,” a theatrical-political event at the Vienna Festival.

«The moment he smirked…
and then fired at my eye.
I heard the sound of my eye bursting.
The world spun around my head.
Not darkness…
an explosion of pain.
I could hear people shouting:
Hot blood poured down my face”
and I… had just one wish:
to see the world again with my right eye.
This is not just a memory….»

بخش کوتاهی از سخنرانیم در «دادگاه وین» يك اتفاق نمايشى_سياسى در جشنواره وين.

«لحظه‌ای که نیشخند زد…
و بعد شلیک کرد به چشمم.

صدای ترکیدن چشمم رو شنیدم.
دنیا دور سرم چرخید.
نه تاریکی… یک انفجار از درد.

می‌شنیدم مردم فریاد می‌زنن:
«بی‌شرف… بی‌شرف…»

خون داغ از صورتم… pic.twitter.com/K8E6XLojuR

— Kosar Eftekhari 🕊️ (@kosareftekharii) June 2, 2026

From Luana,  more information about the murder of Henry Nowak. The Daily Fail reports that the murderer’s mother hid the murder weapon (a knife) in her home.

DIGWA TAUNTED AND TORTURED HENRY FOR 10 MINUTES!!

Henry lay dying, pleading for help. DIGWA AND the POLICE mocked and laughed at him.

They didn’t play the additional clips or recordings in court. They said “it’s too disturbing.”

Yet it’s what Henry endured-what DIGWA and his… pic.twitter.com/GtnkDXuQCD

— Imtiaz Mahmood (@ImtiazMadmood) June 5, 2026

Speaking of which, Luana also sent this, which is not going to go down well with “progressives”. Many of these are videos:

🚨BREAKING: The “taking the knee” trend has exploded across Britain.

Thousands are kneeling for Henry Nowak specifically to the track:

Michael Jackson “They Don’t Really Care About Us.”

The left are in a complete meltdown. pic.twitter.com/vG3SJRMFRm

— The British Patriot (@TheBritLad) June 4, 2026

From Naama, a fairytale scene (sound up):

oh to be ducks walking on Hydrangea petals pic.twitter.com/hCBJ04i4zn

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 30, 2025

One from my feed; great camouflage!:

In the forests of Madagascar the leaf-tailed gecko makes itself almost invisible pic.twitter.com/2qToZPFaVV

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) June 5, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

6 June 1936 | A Czech Jewish girl, Eva Steindlerová, was born.She was deported to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt Ghetto on 16 October 1944 with her mother Gertruda. They were both probably murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.—▶ Gas chambers of Auschwitz: https://youtu.be/-A05i25j9Ck

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T02:00:05.039578246Z

And two from Dr. Cobb:  He says the first one is “not entirely true” as one can see further down the thread. Sadly, I cannot see that post because I am blocked (BlueSky is famous for blocking people):

There are almost no crustaceans in the deep ocean.Not because they would get crushed, but because they would DISSOLVE.The cold & high pressure cause changes to water that make it very corrosive to calcium carbonate shells.But there's one crustacean who solves this problem with ALUMINUM ARMOR.

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T23:16:29.950Z

I may have posted this one before but can’t be arsed to check. Anyway, it’s beautiful:

Display of a Bohemian waxwing. These are largely found in the northern boreal forests of North America/Eurasia, and are social birds that form large noisy groups-sometimes in the 1000's- as they scour the landscape looking for fruit. 📹 wildsafarisaga on IG

— Helen (@helenmaryme.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T16:14:28.197Z