Cruel Britannia

 Sheku Kanneh-Mason was just nineteen when he won the gig of a lifetime, playing at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.  The cellist became an instant celebrity, with a best-selling album called Elgar, including the concerto long regarded as the property of Jacqueline Du Pre.  Then he went on Desert Island Discs, the BBC's venerable (1942) radio program, and suggested that the last night of the Proms concerts might end with something besides the audience joining in a bombastic "Rule, Britannia."  The internet lost its mind, overflowing with the kind of racist abuse that explains why Harry and Meghan chose to live in California.  (Even Trump doesn't call for "deportation, flogging, sending him 'back to Africa'" most of the time.)  The BBC addressed it with a bland statement essentially blaming Sir Henry Wood, who founded the Proms in 1895, and totally missing the point.  Here is Kanneh-Mason playing beautifully in Westminster Abbey.  You're going to need it.

Social media is sputtering with a report that Vladimir Putin declared the 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States "illegal."  A State Department spokesman already told reporters, "Certainly he's not getting it back," to much hilarity.  Snopes is on the case, though, and it seems that's not what Putin said.  TASS reports a decree allocating funds "for search of Soviet, Imperial Russian property abroad."  It sounds like the other oligarchs are complaining that for the second summer, they won't be able to enjoy their yachts and other goodies frozen by Western governments since the unlawful invasion of Ukraine.  More work for the lawyers but alas, no unloading Sarah Palin.

You'd expect God to have his hands full guiding the careers of Mike Johnson and Ryan Binkley and fending off the Trump challenge, but he also found time to advise Eli Regalado, Colorado pastor in the totally real Destiny Churches & Ministries International.  Specifically, he told the pastor and his wife to create their own cryptocurrency and sell it to the congregation so they could remodel their house and buy a Range Rover, among other things totaling $1.3 million.  And now the Colorado Securities Division has filed civil fraud charges, despite the First Amendment giving religious grifters carte blanche (at least according to generations of bonehead judges).

Pastor Regalado notwithstanding, it's hard to be a Christian.  For two years Houston has struggled to stop a non-sectarian group called Food Not Bombs from distributing food to homeless people.  (There is an actual city ordinance against giving food to people "in need.")  They tried the group twice without getting the result they wanted, and had to give up on a third trial when not even three prospective jurors agreed that feeding the hungry is bad.  Texas, boy, I don't know.  In Bryan, Ohio, where it's colder, Pastor Chris Avell was arrested for zoning violations because he allowed homeless people to sleep in his church.  Joel Osteen didn't even want people tracking mud into his megachurch during Hurricane Harvey, and Houston had no problem with that.

Perhaps inspired by Dubai's artificial islands, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz proposes the creation of such an island three miles off the coast of Gaza to "promote deep positive changes in the Gaza Strip."  Last year the government issued an equally realistic proposal to deport transfer all Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula of Egypt.  There is no reason you should think about the Nazis' plan to ship four million Jews to Madagascar.  So don't think about it.

"Ding ding ding ding ding ding!  They've only got seventeen seconds to figure this whole thing out, right?  Boom, OK, missile launch.  Pssshng, boom!  It's the most -- and we don't have it here!"  But we will once Trump is restored to power, an "iron dome" just like Israel's.  (It's possible he believes it's an actual dome made of iron.)  When I think of the billions Reagan spent on "Star Wars" without ever getting it to work...genius.   Ding ding, pssshng, boom.

Do not call Elon Musk antisemitic just because Xitter is crawling with antisemitic posts and Hitler fanboys.  Elon Musk is not antisemitic.  Most of his friends are Jewish.  "I'm like Jewish by association, I'm aspirationally Jewish," he told the European Jewish Association in Krakow after a private tour of Auschwitz.  Remember that the next time he supports conspiracy theories or reinstates bigots like Kanye and Trump -- he's just defending free speech.  And don't cancel your ads, or he'll have to sue the Anti-Defamation League.  Did you know Xitter could have saved "millions of lives" during the Holocaust?  And probably prevented the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Meanwhile, in Laconia, New Hampshire:  "We have become a drug-infested, crime-ridden nation which is incapable of solvin' even the swollest, smallest problems, the simplest of problems we can no longer solve.  We can't do anything.  We are an institute in a powerful death penalty!  We will put this on!"

Hell if I know.