Men's Lifestyle July 3, 2026 0 Comments

This Independence Day: What If Our Greatest Freedom Is Still Waiting to Be Unleashed?

Isn’t it a bit wild that as we mark the semiquincentennial of the Fourth of July, the echoes of John Adams and Frederick Douglass still seriously divide how we see this day? On one hand, Adams dreamed of “Pomp and Parade, Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations” as celebrations of hard-fought liberty. On the other, Douglass called out the glaring hypocrisy of a country still shackled by injustice, mourning while others rejoiced. Fast forward to 2026, and here we are: battling heat waves that could fry an egg on city sidewalks, wrestling with a government more a circus than a sanctuary, and witnessing the resurfacing ghosts of old prejudices. Yet, maybe—just maybe—the best way to honor this convoluted legacy is to light those bonfires anyway. Not to gloss over the mess we’re in but to rekindle hope for what could be. So, how will you choose to celebrate—a hollow spectacle, or a fiercely genuine illumination from sea to shining sea? LEARN MORE

10 min read

Out on the Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Two great Americans on how to celebrate the Fourth:

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not.

I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.

Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

–John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776

(John, of course, was referring to July 2, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and not the Fourth, but what do you all want from me, anyway?)

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

…

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.

–Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852.

The history of the country is suspended between those two views of the Fourth. What Adams and his crew wrought in 1776, Douglass demanded be fulfilled in 1852. It has yet to be permanently fulfilled to this day.

In 2026, we are celebrating our semiquincentennial Fourth under the presidency of a walking profanation of everything that Adams and Douglass stood for. Our national government is a not particularly attractive whorehouse. Hell, the Oval Office is gussied up literally like a not particularly attractive whorehouse. Hard-won advances going back centuries are under assault in the states, in Congress, and in the Supreme Court. White supremacy is struggling mightily to be reborn, again, the way it was after the Civil War, and it already has won some substantial victories. To paraphrase Mr. Douglass, what to the rest of us is the Fourth of July?

For me, I have decided to follow Mr. Adams’s advice and enjoy me some “Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations.” Not as a distraction from the grim condition of the country, but as a celebration of what was and what might again be. The administration and its supporters have so estranged themselves from those celebrations that they’ve been forced to concoct pathetic simulacrums. The Great National State Fair. The UFC fight on the White House lawn. Ballrooms and arches and golden eagles. It’s all counterfeit, in celebration of a man the founders wouldn’t have allowed to clean their spittoons and whom Frederick Douglass would have left in a pile of ash in front of his rostrum.

Me? I’m with those two guys and the forgotten, noble struggle to reconcile their respective visions of what we celebrate this weekend. I’m for bonfires and illuminations, from sea to shining sea. Light it up, America. Happy Fourth.

Celebrations hereabouts are likely to be primarily indoors because, thanks to those clever Chinese climate hoaxsters, the heat dome has come back, and it plans to stay for a while. From CNN:

Air temperatures also pushed into the triple-digits early Thursday afternoon, including in Philadelphia, Newark, New Jersey, and at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The airport hit 100 degrees—just one degree shy of tying its high temperature record for the date. Thursday became the hottest day of the year in New York City’s Central Park in the early afternoon when the temperature climbed into the upper 90s, with even hotter conditions still to come.

More than 160 million people are under “major” (Level 3 of 4) or “extreme” (4 of 4) heat risk through the end of the week, according to the National Weather Service. These categories are associated with a sharp increase in heat-related illnesses, especially during prolonged heat waves with little overnight relief.

Europe has been cooking for a while now, to the point where the glaciers in the Alps are melting. Still, we have the nuanced take of Representative Brandon Gill, the latest young tyro of the Xwitter right. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani encouraged his constituents to keep their thermostats at 78 degrees so as not to overtax the city’s electrical grid. And Gill responded:

“Welcome to socialism, where the government demands you turn your house into a sauna because they can’t plan for the super unpredictable fact that it tends to get hot in the summer.”

First of all, if your sauna is 78 degrees, you got cheated. Second, a recommendation is not a mandate, nor is it an order, nor is it a Stalinist diktat. It’s a suggestion. Like when someone tells you to go fck yourself. You don’t have to do it. They just have to be victims.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Blues Minuet” (James Booker): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1949, are some British people sweltering during an epic heat wave. Whole lot of sleeping going on. History, if not Britain, is so cool.

Hey, Catholics, we got an authentic schism going on! From Reuters:

The Vatican said on Thursday that priests and lay Catholics who are part of a breakaway right-wing Catholic group that ordained bishops without Pope Leo’s approval were in schism with the wider Church and now excommunicated. In a strong decree, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the ‌top watchdog authority for the 1.4-billion-member Church, also warned Catholics globally that the Swiss-based Society of St. Pius X now celebrated the sacraments illicitly.

The Society of St. Pius X denies the central teachings of the Second Vatican Council, a landmark Vatican gathering of bishops in the 1960s that pursued a range of reforms for the global Church and sought to repair its relations with Jews and other Christian denominations. The Council also allowed ⁠for the Mass, until then said only in Latin, to be celebrated in local languages. The society rejected that change, citing a desire for the Latin rite’s sense of mystery and formality.

Massimo Faggioli, an expert on the papacy, told Reuters that Leo believed very firmly in the reforms of the Council, often referred to by Catholics as “Vatican II.” “He has no regrets, no doubts about the fact that this is the Church of Vatican ⁠II,” said Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia. “He has shown that he doesn’t want to compromise on that.”

The Society, whose followers are sometimes known as Lefebvrists after their founder, Archbishop Marcel ⁠Lefebvre, says it counts 733 priests worldwide. Its leadership, which has long had tense relations with the Vatican, says it needed to ordain new bishops to have enough prelates to lead the group. Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 after ordaining four bishops without permission from then-Pope John Paul II. Benedict XVI, John Paul’s successor, sought to renew dialogue with the society and lifted four remaining excommunications.

Of course he did.

Outside of an academic interest, I, like most of the folks in the pews around the world, could care less about these ecclesiastical catfights. I hope Leo wins this one, because I, too, am a fan of the Vatican II reforms, and because it will go straight up the nose of Vice President J Divan Vance, who recently has taken on the role of papal advisor.

“I do think that some of ⁠the things that have come out of the Vatican on the immigration question in particular have been troubling, and ultimately I disagree with it,” Vance, a Catholic, said in an interview on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle show. “What I tell the Catholic leadership I talk to who disagree with our immigration policies, you know, I’m not hostile about it. I invite them to have the conversation but I also encourage them to ‌remember ⁠that mass migration has victims.”

I don’t believe His Holiness is a regular viewer of The Ingraham Angle. Of course, hardly anyone is. And I applaud J Divan Vance for finding entirely new audiences to insult.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From NPR:

Experts from the Moesgaard Museum said this week that the sprawling 100,000-square-meter (more than 1 million-square-foot) site features an area for processing flax as well as more than 80 pit houses—semisubmerged huts that were used as workshops and dwellings in Viking times. Archaeologist Liv Stidsing Reher-Langberg, who led the 10-month dig, said that “we have a clear focus on textile production, which makes this settlement different from other kinds of settlements of this period.” “We have spindle whorls, we have weight looms; that tells us about what has been going on in the pit houses,” said Reher-Langberg, adding that archaeologists had also discovered silver coins, glass beads and pottery.

Well, somebody had to make all those work clothes for all that pillaging, and all that formalwear for feasting and guzzling.

Andersen said that the discovery at Søften shows that Vikings were “not just simple, uncivilized, barbaric hordes, rambling about Europe.” “To have a place like Søften, you need a very well-organized society with a production line, and you also need a market to have the production,” he said. “The textiles from Søften go into a market that’s much bigger than just the local area.”

The very first shopping mall. Flagons of mead at every Cinnabon.

Hey, AP. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Scientists have stumbled on a rare dinosaur fossil from Antarctica, tucked away for decades in a drawer. The bone comes from the tail of a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur called a titanosaur. Scientists haven’t yet identified the species it belongs to. It was discovered in 1985 during an expedition to Antarctica’s James Ross Island and collected by geologist Mike Thomson. Working with the British Antarctic Survey, Thomson was mapping the area’s rock layers and collected marine reptile fossils to help with future dating efforts. He recorded the find as a large reptile. Decades later, paleontologist Mark Evans spotted the bone in the British Antarctic Survey’s collections and wondered whether it might be a dinosaur. He and other researchers analyzed the shape of the bone and compared it to other more complete dinosaur remains, confirming their discovery. The findings were published on Monday in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

It was a tailbone, in case you were wondering, and you know you were. It looks like this feller died young, back when Antarctica was a lush forested place, and that his body floated out to sea, sank, and was fossilized in what was then marine rock. It makes you wonder how many museums have “junk drawers” like we have in our kitchens, and what might be stashed there. Surprises like this are proof that they lived then to make us happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people, and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware, and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of The Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornadoes in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.