@sanjoychakra@realMaalouf If this fabulous Iran "Deal" is anything like I've been reading about it's nothing but business as usual and the freedom fighters of Iran just got the rug pulled from under them once again.
Elbows Up Canadian fans booed the US flag at the FIFA World Cup 2026 opening ceremony.
Tonight at UFC Freedom 250, American fans proudly sang the Canadian national anthem for Aiemann Zahabi.
This is how you respect a flag.
This is real class and sportsmanship.
Those classless Canadians that followed Justin Trudeau’s direction to boo the US National
Anthem could learn a lot from Americans. 🇨🇦🇺🇸👏
#FIFAWorldCup #WorldCup2026 #UFCFreedom250 #UFC #Sportsmanship #RespectTheFlag #CanadaUSA
He showed up with judgment in his heart.
Left with beaver nuggets in his stomach.
‘I came to judge… and stayed for the snacks.’
God bless the beaver. 🦫”
I requested a simple band of rubber from my host. She gestured to a drawer, and the very gesture told me everything I needed to know about American chaos.
One drawer. Every household. Always in the kitchen, and it holds the same things in every home in the nation: batteries of unknown charge. Rubber bands. A screwdriver too short for any screw. Birthday candles. Soy sauce packets. Three pens, one of which works. And a key.
The key is the part I cannot release. I have now surveyed eleven households. ALL have the key. NONE know what it opens.
"What does this open?" I asked Sue, holding it up.
"No idea. Been there since we moved in."
"Then why keep it?"
She looked at me as if I had proposed burning a shrine. "You can't throw away a KEY."
She is right. I felt it the moment she said it. A key answers to a lock somewhere. To discard it is to abandon a door you may never find. Eleven households, each guarding one orphaned promise, between the candles and the takeout menus.
In Japan, we made a national art of putting things in their proper place. I assumed the junk drawer was that art's absence. Wrong. The junk drawer IS the proper place — for things whose place has not yet been revealed. Not disorder. Faith, with a handle.
I confess my crime. I once organized Dale's junk drawer while waiting for him. Small bins. Categories. He opened it, stood silent, and said, "Where's the thing?" He could not name the thing. He knew only that it could no longer be found. I had alphabetized a treasure map. We do not speak of it.
The drawer does not need order. It needs to be opened with hope, and closed with acceptance.
I keep a junk drawer of my own now. This week it accepted a battery, a twist tie, and a key I found in the yard. I do not know what the key opens.
Into the drawer it goes. Someday, the door will announce itself.
🇺🇸 The 50 star American flag flying today was designed in 1958 by 17 year old Robert G. Heft as a high school class project.
He got a B-minus on it.
The teacher claimed the design "lacked originality" and jokingly remarked that if Heft didn't like the grade, he should get the flag accepted in Washington.
Heft called his teacher's bluff. He sent his physical prototype to his congressman, Walter Moeller, who forwarded it to the design pool.
Out of more than 1,500 submissions, President Eisenhower picked his design.
His teacher later changed his grade to an A.
Thank you, Robert! The flag is beautiful! 🇺🇸
Fetterman just absolutely torched Graham Platner after Platner called him an “a**hole.”
“Oh, I’m devastated! I’m devastated! The tough guy who roughs up ex-girlfriends and walks around with a Nazi tattoo doesn’t like me? I’ll wear that as a badge of honor.”
Then Fetterman ripped the media for treating Platner’s ugly past like a minor footnote instead of a screaming red flag.
Funny how the press will dig into a Republican’s lunch order from 1997, but a left-wing clown with abuse allegations and a Nazi tattoo suddenly needs “context.”
Classic media double standard.
What do you think? 👇
#Fetterman #MediaBias #Hypocrisy
🇺🇸 Double Shot of Badass Americans: William J. Crawford
He was a janitor at the Air Force Academy for many years. The cadets who passed him every day had no idea they were walking among a living legend.
Born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1918, Crawford was drafted into the Army in July 1942.
By September 1943 he was serving as a Private and squad scout with Company I, 3rd Platoon, 142nd Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division in southern Italy.
On September 13, 1943, his platoon attacked German positions on Hill 424 near Altavilla.
After reaching the crest, they were immediately pinned down by machine gun and small arms fire from multiple enemy positions.
Without orders and completely on his own, Crawford moved forward alone under heavy fire.
He first located one machine gun dug in on a terrace directly in front of the platoon.
He crawled through open ground under fire, closed to within a few yards of the emplacement, destroyed the gun with a hand grenade, and killed three of the crew.
He kept going.
Crawford spotted a second machine gun position firing on his men.
Again moving alone and exposed, he advanced on the crew under fire. When he got close enough, he threw a grenade, destroyed the gun, and eliminated the crew.
He still wasn't finished.
He located a third German machine gun that was continuing to pin down his unit.
Once more he advanced alone through enemy fire, closed on the position, killed one of the Germans with rifle fire. Two other Germans who were there fled.
Crawford, the badass he was, grabbed the German machine gun, turned it around, and fired on them as they were running down the hill.
Crawford had single handedly taken out all three machine gun nests that were holding up his entire platoon.
A few days later he was captured by the Germans. His fellow soldiers thought he had been killed.
He would spend the next 19 months as a prisoner of war.
Because the Army believed he was KIA, the Medal of Honor for his actions was awarded posthumously and presented to his father in 1944.
When the war ended and Crawford was returned home, he had technically already received the nation’s highest award, but he was never formally presented with it.
He would stay in the military until the 1960's, retiring as a Master Sergeant.
He then took a quiet job as a janitor at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
For many years he mopped floors and cleaned the cadet squadrons without ever mentioning his service. Thousands of cadets passed by him over the years without the slightest clue.
Then, in the late 1970s, a cadet was reading a book about the Allied campaign in Italy and stumbled upon his name. He asked the janitor about it.
Crawford simply replied, “That was one day in my life and it happened a long time ago.”
They were shocked to find out their janitor was that same person.
The cadets spread the word and helped arrange for him to have the recognition he deserved.
On May 30, 1984, nearly 41 years after his actions, President Reagan personally awarded Master Sergeant William J. Crawford his Medal of Honor during the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.
William J. Crawford is an American Badass 🇺🇸
Ein Imker-Urgestein bereitet Veganern nun Kopfzerbrechen 🔥
„Ohne meine Bienen hätten sie mit ihren Veganern nix zu fressen, weil 80 % ihrer gesamten Ernährung von meinen Bienen kommt ... Also lassen Sie mich mit Ihrem veganischen Scheißdreck in Ruhe.“ 🤣
Everyone knows John Hancock for his giant signature. Almost nobody knows the actual man, and his real life was wilder than the legend.
He was an orphan. His father died when he was 7, and he was taken in by his uncle Thomas, the richest merchant in Boston. John was groomed to run the family shipping empire, inherited the whole thing in 1764, and became one of the wealthiest men in all of America before most people his age owned anything at all.
He was also, by the crown's definition, a criminal. In 1768 the British seized his ship Liberty for smuggling, and Boston rioted in his defense. The man we now put on patriotic posters was, to London, a wealthy smuggler dodging customs.
He didn't just resent the crown quietly. He bankrolled resistance and became such a thorn that the British wanted him gone. On the night of April 18, 1775, when Paul Revere made his famous ride, the warning was not vague. He rode to Lexington specifically to warn two men that the British were coming to arrest them: Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The opening night of the Revolutionary War was, in part, a manhunt for Hancock.
Weeks later, General Gage offered a pardon to every rebel in Massachusetts who would lay down arms, with exactly two exceptions: Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Being left off that list was essentially a public death warrant.
Here is the part nobody tells you. As president of the Continental Congress, Hancock actually wanted to be named commander of the army himself. He sat in the chair and watched as the Adams cousins instead rose to nominate George Washington. He was reportedly stung by it. Then he did the thing most people never manage. He swallowed his pride, signed Washington's commission, and spent the next eight years pouring his personal fortune into the war he could not lead.
So when Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence first, big and bold across the top, it was not a cute flourish. He was already a hunted man with a price on his head, putting his name, his fortune, and his neck on the line before anyone else dared lift a pen.
And that famous line about signing large "so King George can read it without his spectacles"? He almost certainly never said it. It is a myth stitched onto him generations later. The real story is better. He just signed first, as president, knowing exactly what it could cost him.
The flamboyance was real, though. He lived in princely splendor in a granite mansion on Beacon Hill overlooking the harbor, with imported mahogany furniture and apricot trees shipped from Spain. In 1775 he married Dorothy Quincy, and the two became one of Massachusetts' first political celebrity couples, famous for endless lavish dinners that slowly drained his fortune.
He went on to become the first Governor of Massachusetts, serving roughly eleven years, and died in office in 1793. His funeral was one of the grandest ever given to an American up to that point. Samuel Adams declared the day a state holiday.
The orphaned smuggler with a target on his back had become the face of American defiance.
That is why, 250 years later, we still say "put your John Hancock right here."
On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history.
The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet.
Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention.
He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette.
He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents.
A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.