Archive → June, 2026
Happy Solstice Father’s Day
Father’s Day 2026 coincides with the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice. In traditional societies, both winter and summer solstices are central to religion and culture, often gathering people together for initial crop harvests, or for winter-time prayers for a successful coming-year crop yield.
Is it not meaningful or symbolic that celebrating Fatherhood got the longest day of the year in 2026? After all, fatherhood, which is also stewardship, careful management, husbandry, a pile of other synonyms and principles for judicious oversight and watchfulness, is central to any successful family and enterprise?
Fathers have always been central to healthy families, and there is no reason to artificially exclude dads now from healthy families.
About twenty years ago, a dear old friend from Penn State emailed a photo of a single mom, tattooed and pierced, holding her young child. An early form of meme, the photo’s caption said something about how women don’t need no stinkin’ men in their lives and can do everything just fine themselves. It was an angry feminist attack on men in general, and on fatherhood specifically, summing up the then-spiraling and now-spiraled-and-disintegrated state of American society and family alike.
Boy, or man, did that meme age poorly! Nowadays, even the most ardently leftwing sociology professor is acknowledging the necessity of two-parent homes for having children grow up into healthy, adjusted, functioning adults. The data today is simply overwhelming: Men and women together build the soundest, most resilient families. Everything else is somewhere on a Bell Curve’s downhill slope toward failure.
Historically, Dad was both provider and defender. In a world of fang, claw, and tooth, the mighty arm of Dad could wield a spear, a knife, a sword, and keep hairy death at bay. And because both hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies are based on human muscle, Dad’s brawn was central to family survival.
Today, in the West, Dad has been re-invented, mostly against his will and against his interest, against the interest of happy and healthy families. Part class clown and all goof, Dad’s role in popular culture has taken a steady beating from the far-left anarchists running American academia and media. But nature has not changed, and human nature has not changed, and despite heavily promoted fuzzy notions of utopian lifestyles, do-it-all moms and super-women, Dad is still just as needed today as he was a thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago.
If nothing else, a hundred thousand years of human evolution still wants, needs, the comfort of Dad’s words, his encouragement, his bravery, leadership, risk-taking, his steadfast commitment to his family. Not every Dad is up to the job at 100% all the time, but just showing up every day is about 75% of the job. And like in baseball, batting 75% is pretty damned good. Most kids will cut their own Dad some slack, if they believe that he has tried to do his best to be the father they needed.
Thanks, Dad and Dads everywhere. We all love you and we all appreciate you. You are the longest day in our lives, because you have the heaviest influence on us. Hopefully, Dad uses his influence for the good and health of his family. After all, that is being a Dad…
Give appeasement a chance
Yes, the “Iran Deal” is appeasement of a dangerous American enemy. Yes, it looks like disgraced British prime minister Neville Chamberlain has arisen from the dead, and declared “Peace in our time” with Iran.
(Chamberlain traveled to Germany three times in 1938 to meet with Adolf Hitler, who pinky- promised him that Germany had no intention of invading more of Czechoslovakia, or any of Poland, or France, or England or or or… and then Germany invaded all of those places, and more, and proved how foolish it is to believe the promises of totalitarian homicidal maniacs like Adolf Hitler or the Iranian mullahs)
Yes, American administrations have rightly said for at least fifty years “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” And what is the “Iran Deal” but direct negotiation, and direct bilateral signatures by the American president, no less, which fully legitimizes the terrorists. This tends to undermine our own credibility in the long run, with terrorists and their victims alike.
Yes, setting “red line” one after another, only to run out of red pens and out of buckets of red paint to draw any more red lines, because Iran had already crossed all of them, and then not holding Iran accountable for crossing them, sends the wrong message. It tells Iran that no matter what, they can probably get away with murder, if they call it something else.
Yes, throwing our allies under the bus (Israel, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait) when they no longer suit our superficial goal of creating the impression of a “peace deal” is really bad form. And then criticizing Israel for defending its citizens against cross-border rocket fire, because self-defense might mess up the “peace deal,” puts the self-defender in the hot seat, and Iran, the aggressor, in the driver’s seat. This is just bad chess.
One of my greatest concerns is that JD Vance, the Iran deal’s greatest salesman, is so un-likable and abrasive and arrogant, that as the the de facto nominee in 2028, he will cost us the presidency. I 1000% want a Republican president to win the 2028 election, and more and more it looks like Marco Rubio is the one to do it. JD Vance has a sour personality, he just radiates hostile disdain for anyone who disagrees with him, and I do not believe enough Americans will vote for him to make him president. This is perhaps my biggest issue with the “Iran deal”: The wrong guy is trying to sell it.
We can go on and on here, and critique the “Iran deal” line by line, idea by idea, action by action. But, we need to give appeasement a chance.
No, the Iran deal” is not peace by any definition, and it comes with a lot of warnings to Iran, and promises of more bombings if Iran does anything wrong. Yes, it is open appeasement, and no, Iran is unlikely to stick to its end of the deal. However, consider the short-term benefits:
a) Gasoline prices dropped immediately, b) oil markets began leveling out immediately, c) Republicans have less of a likelihood of carrying the millstone of high fuel prices and a less-than-perfect economy around their necks as they enter the mid-term election season, which culminates this November. If the Republicans can survive this election cycle, and maintain control of the US House and the US Senate, then President Trump is not a lame duck for 2027 and 2028, but rather a jet-fueled, super-charged, hypersonic vehicle for even more much needed change.
And if Iran does in fact go back to its old terrorist ways, then Daddy Trump will have no problem reminding them who carries the belt.
So, yes, yes, I know, people are unhappy with the “Iran deal,” but let us give it a chance to bear fruit, if not for years, then at least for the next few months.
Make the most of your summer!
Summer is really in full swing now. Outside temperatures are warm to hot, plenty of sunshine, school is out, beaches and picnics and state parks beckon. Fresh air, some vitamin D sunshine on the skin. Summer really is our best time to relax with family and friends, take a breather from non-stop work, take family vacations, go play with our kids or grandkids. Work never ends, and there are few opportunities to stop working and just focus on family, except for the summer.
Man, I love summer time.
I myself enjoy summer gardening. We grow the basics: Various tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers for canned pickles, butternut squash, and a bunch of herbs and spices like basil, sage, rosemary, and dill. We also grow peaches and apples; our cherries were marauded to death by the grackles and squirrels this year. All of our home grown food is pesticide free, chemical free, which normally costs more when you buy it.
I get a big enjoyment from growing our own food, and whatever is extra, is frozen in ziploc bags. Zucchini is cut up and frozen, tomatoes are washed off and frozen whole. We eat a lot of ratatouille in the summer, because zucchini and tomatoes are so abundant. Throw in a few eggs, and you have shakshuka. Very nutritious, healthy, low fat food.
Whatever it is that you enjoy doing in the summer, make sure you do it to the max. Miss no opportunities, because these long hours and sunny days will not be coming back. Take them not for granted! Your kids will remember every moment at the beach with you, fishing with you, picnicking with you, for the rest of their lives. These are special and meaningful days.
I hope you have a great summer. Make every minute of it count.
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday to President Trump (whose birthday coincides with that of one of my kids)!
Best president of my lifetime, best president since Reagan, and arguably much longer. Yes, President Trump’s strong personality rankles people’s sensibilities, but so did “TR” Theodore Roosevelt. To get great things done often requires great force of personality.
There are certain things I wish President Trump would do, like flat out ignore over-reaching courts, whose overtly politicized holdings on subjects like military justice, White House operations, and other executive branch prerogatives, are lightyears outside the judicial branch’s jurisdiction. The courts are a co-equal branch with the presidency and executive branch; not superior, stronger, or more authoritative.
There are certain things I wish President Trump would not do, like create a forced “deal” with Iran that no one buys, no one expects to last, much less work. Yeah, we understand the president feels the need to try something different than acquiescence or total war… but, this is not likely to bear fruit.
Nonetheless, I appreciate President Trump’s patriotic passion for a free America and prosperous Americans. No one else like him, which scares me. What will happen to America when this great protector is no longer in office?
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D Day May-Day, D Day Pride Day
Tomorrow is D-Day, the anniversary of the heroic Allied invasion of France’s Normandy beaches on June 6th, 1944, in order to bring offensive action against evil.
Movies like Saving Private Ryan have been made about D Day. Books have been written, patriotic marches and celebrations and interviews of veterans about it. Without the heroism of primarily American soldiers and Airmen, beginning on D Day and continuing through to after the end of the war, World War II would have been won by Nazi Germany, and the world as we know it today would not exist.
To my generation, D Day is well known, symbolic, inspiring. I have friends and family members whose fathers fought on D-Day, on the beaches, in the dunes, and up into the hedgerows. Some died there, all returned to America with painful memories of it, and some with the physical battle scars of their time there.
Yes, my generation knows all about D Day. It embodies the clearest example of Good vs. Evil. It was the day that the Western Civilization calvary came galloping in, at huge cost in blood and money, to save the day, save Europe. It is one of the most inspiring days in modern American history, and people my age can casually talk about D Day as if it happened just yesterday.
And yet, I worry about it, because D Day is fast becoming a minor footnote in the modern American education establishment. Because the far-left teacher’s unions run the American education establishment, there is a huge and mostly successful effort to erase positive history about America, and replace it with indefensible nonsense about “systemic racism,” and with adult sexuality that has no place among children. The modern American culture is rejecting D Day heroism and electing to office hyper sexual freaks who advocate for preying upon children.
So I am making a May-Day call for help on D Day remembrance, and I think we should call every June hereafter “D Day Pride Month.” The entire month of June will be devoted to educating Americans about the evils of big government fascism, like the Germans did in 1944.
Let us reinforce the good and positive things about America, our greatness, the acts of heroism and self sacrifice of our citizens that got our greatest nation to this successful point in human history. We need an antidote to the meaningless hedonistic physical crap (drugs, sex, aimless lethargy as a lifestyle of choice) that is just rotting out America into a hollowed husk.
Happy D Day Pride Month, dear readers!
You are reading this as a free American because of the self sacrifice and bravery of these American fighting men disembarking from this boat into a hailstorm of bullets and bombs on D Day, 1944. Remember that.
Does your happiness determine your politics?
Having grown up with leftists, and been surrounded by leftists, and worked primarily if not almost exclusively with leftists for the first 2/3 of my career, I have developed a loose theory of political orientation: Our happiness determines our politics.
Americans holding leftist political views tend to be less happy, dis-satisfied, or just generally unhappy.
“If you are not angry, you are not paying attention” went one popular leftist bumper sticker in the 1990s. Anger seems to be a self-recognized trait among leftists, a bond uniting them.
Given that what seems like 98% of political violence or culturally-based violence in America is committed by Democrats or leftists, it would follow that anger and unhappiness are driving traits in the left. Anger and hate are precursors to violence.
Karl Marx, the 1850s father of Marxism/ socialism/communism and the ends-justify-the-means political tyranny, was a notoriously dis-satisfied guy. One famous letter from his father to him excoriates Marx for never being happy and always looking to blame others for his own failures. To think that Karl Marx’s political descendants would fall far from his ideological tree is really stretching the truth of natural human character.
I could go on and on and really develop this theory, like Ten Commandments level envy is the core of evil “equity”/ thieving redistributive politics, but if you doubt this, look around yourself. Look at the people around you, and ask yourself, Who is angry, and who is optimistic and positive?
And then figure out the politics of the angry, dis-satisfied people and the politics of the happy, optimistic people. In my experience, with a few exceptions, the unhappy people are almost always on the political left. And the optimistic people are almost always on the political center-right. The few exceptions to this rule have all been rural Democrats from around Central PA. Maxine, Robb, a few others I know from rural backgrounds, all seem to be happy people and also liberal-left.
And of course we all know some gruff, jaded, grumpy old conservative curmudgeons…
So it just made me wonder if our life experience, family background and upbringing, etc determine our happiness, and then our politics naturally follow that. It seems to be the case, much more often then not the case.
My two cents.
Your experience may differ, but I doubt it will by much.
USS Liberty…what happened and why we should know
In the heat of the Six Day War just fifty-nine years ago, an American Navy spy ship in the eastern Mediterranean Sea was strafed, bombed, badly damaged, and I think 34 US Sailors died as a result, with many others getting hurt and having lasting combat-related injuries.
Despite the documented history of friendly-fire incidents going all the way back to Greek and Roman naval battles, with not one being in common parlance or memory today, the attack on the USS Liberty has persisted and persisted and persisted up until right now, when it serves as a battle cry against the only reason anyone knows anything about it: Jews.
Israel’s ships and planes attacked the USS Liberty, by mistake, and thus has a special grudge and entire anti-Jew movement built up and carried on around the incident. That Israel is America’s only real and loyal ally makes the accusation carry even more weight.
No Jews, no news, goes the modern adage. Because the USS Liberty involved a handful of Israeli naval sailors and pilots, all Jews everywhere are despised, and the state of Israel became a criminal enterprise, this USS Liberty movement says. For the mistaken acts of some warriors in the heat of battle, all of their kinsmen everywhere must be hated, judged, cast out, and exterminated forever, says this political movement based on the USS Liberty attack. No forgiveness ever!
If you doubt me, go online anywhere the USS Liberty is discussed, like a YouTube or Rumble video, or a written article, and see for yourself. The comments sections are filled up with endless acid vitriol for all Jews, everywhere, and ditto for the existence of the state of Israel. As if this one brief incident speaks for the full character of every single one of the ten million Jews around the entire world, and for an entire nation.
Which is bizarre, because no other group of humans anywhere is judged entirely in its entirety for the acts of a few in the midst of an existential battle for survival.
Despite having a long, bad reputation as thuggish ruffians, the Irish today are beloved leprechauns. There is no hateful world-wide anti-Irishman anti-Ireland movement based on some anti-British massacre by Irish nationalists that occurred two hundred years ago. My own quip is that if you don’t have at least a tiny amount of Irish in you, you are not a real American. No one hates all of the Irish, certainly not Ireland as a nation.
Ditto for Germany, whose crimes against humans in World War One and World War Two were truly monstrous. No one hates all Germans everywhere, and no one calls for the dissolution of Germany as a country, based on its national actions in the early and mid-20th century.
Ditto for Russia and Russians, whose terrible crimes against Poland and Polish citizens for the past two hundred years, or its own extermination of Chechens just twenty years ago, could easily disqualify them from belonging to world civilization.
And so on, including South Africa, which today in 2026 is far more racist and Apartheid than the South Africa of 1986.
And so this reveals why the USS Liberty incident has persisted well beyond the regular shelf life of any other friendly fire example, including the inexplicable recent 1-2-3 tail-end shoot-down of three American fighter jets by a Kuwaiti fighter pilot two months ago. Three expensive American fighter jets that were protecting Kuwait from Iranian bombs and missiles, shot down from behind by a pilot whose deadly actions defy any scrutiny, except for a jihadi mindset against white infidels. But… crickets from the USS Liberty crowd.
Here is what is known about the USS Liberty attack: It was a friendly fire mistake, on a warship that appeared to have no flag and which did not respond to radio challenges or identify itself, during the intense Six Day War in 1967.
Yesterday, Roger Stone disseminated an essay about the USS Liberty. You can find it on his SubStack page. Stone takes a slightly different tack from the usual “hate-the-Jews” mob, in which he blames President Johnson (“LBJ”), Sec. of State Robert MacNamara, and others leading American government in 1967, for the USS Liberty incident, its alleged coverup, and the alleged failure to hold Israel fully completely and totally accountable. Which, of course, as all these conspiracy allegations go, in the end leads Stone to implicate all Jews and the entire nation of Israel….which is the same end result as the other “hate-the-Jews” mob.
It has been distressing to see Roger Stone grasp at internet clicks, and reveal a hateful side of him I had never detected before he wrote that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie, and other open Jew haters, are just good America-first patriots, and anyone caught up in their hateful net deserves to be in it. Roger Stone remains a compelling victim of the Biden witch hunt, and his subsequent character reveals have been truly sad to witness (if you hate all Jews, not just the far left ones who damage America, but all Jews everywhere all the time, including the conservative ones, you have an emotional or mental problem; it is a sickness).
The most sober and thorough discussion of the USS Liberty attack is done by conservative commenter, Jeremy Boreing. His approach is slow, analytical, thorough, methodical, not flamboyant, not flip, not bombastic, not caustic. If you are interested in this sad moment in American military history, and in the failure of our American military to always fully care for our battlefield wounded, watch Jeremy’s video here.
Fifty nine years later, let us honestly remember and fully appreciate the service and sacrifice of our American Navy Sailors on board the USS Liberty. It is important to know the truth, because in truth bad accidents happen, mistakes happen on the field of battle, and it is best that we understand this reality and not defy it by dreaming up mysterious or nefarious explanations that prevent us from problem solving in the future.
USS Liberty after attack
The 1967 Six Day War was one of the great military successes of modern history. It was complicated, big, and messy
The symbol of an Israeli bathing in the Suez Canal was huge
Battlefield chaos in the Sinai Peninsula, and the USS Liberty was anchored just off this coast
The 1967 Six Day War was an all-out battle for Israel’s survival. Any and all threats were attacked. Including mistakenly percieved threats like the USS Liberty