In the last few days, the New York Knicks became the darlings of coming back, and winning; the Ukrainians struck back; the Obama Presidential Center had an inspired opening on Juneteenth.

Heather Cox Richardson tied the package together, along with the Memorandum of Understanding between the White House and Iran.

Here and here are the full remarks of Michelle and Barack Obama at the dedication.

Here is the website for the Obama Presidential Center.

Heather Cox Richardson 3 minute video on Juneteenth history

PRENOTE: The First anniversary of the political assassination of Melissa Hortman and her husband is June 14.  Her murderer was sentenced to life in prison on June 13.  Lori Sturdevant of the Minnesota Star Tribune. has an outstanding column in the June 12 STrib.  You can read it here: MN Star Tribune Lori Sturdevant June 12, 2026

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Drones are a fact of life in modern warfare.  In Sunday, June 7,  Minnesota Star Tribune, columnist Aaron Brown wrote a most interesting column on the topic, with focus on Ukraine and Russia: Drones Aaron Brown.  The column is very much worth your time.

It got me to thinking about the Drones topic in my own little corner of the world.  Searching the word “drones” in my archive, I found 25 posts in which the word appears.

Among them, the one I most remember was December 13, 2011 “The Drones” (see also link to December 20, 2011).  That was 15 years ago.  It was just an honest expression of opinion at the time, and ignited a small firestorm of comments about the technology.

At the time I wrote the 2011 piece, Drones were becoming part of the conversation, but few knew much about them.

Personally, I remember some guy in Hibbing who liked to fly his model plane by remote control (radio) back in the 1980s; and a few years later, just off off Cedar Avenue by the Mall of America, seeing another guy sailing a model boat on a small pond, also radio controlled.

In April, 2016, I saw a thought-provoking film on the issue of drones.  It was “Eye in the Sky”. and my post at the time is here.  As noted, there have been many more posts, just in my space.  Drones are not a new thing….

I’m sure there were people thinking of more military grade uses of drones at the time I first observed them, but at that time in history the internet technology was still in the thinking stage, and likely very hard for any of us to even imagine the days when somebody could accurately and remotely control a tiny flying bomb from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

We live in that future.  Think of the persons in the boats off the coast of Venezuela, killed by drones.  Etc.

Back in 2011 I suppose we could imagine that we could prohibit these weapons of destruction.  But now they are useable everywhere, domestic or foreign, and no longer abstract.

I offer the articles just for personal discussion and reflection.

We will never get rid of Drones, and as sophisticated as they are now, we’ve not seen the end of their evolution.

I’ll reserve my own additional comments on contemporary warfare for a future post after July 4, and I invite you to join in on the conversation.

POSTNOTE:

JUNE 14, 2026: ROBERT REICH ON THE CAGE MATCH AT THE WHITE HOUSE AND WHAT IT MEANS, HERE.  If you’re still not motivated, read this single post, today.

You see many ‘forwards’ below.  Almost all of them are paid subscriptions by myself – they add immeasurably to my knowledge base.  If you can afford subscribe to at least one or more of these commentators.  They’re worth it.

We are at a crucial fork in the road for our country.  I urge you to not only be informed, to be in action wherever you live.  I’m part of the huge majority of ordinary citizens who can make or break their democracy by action or inaction.  The citizens power is the right to vote for officers at all levels, from local to national.  In November we vote for every one of the 435 representatives in the national Congress, plus numerous U.S. Senators, Governors, state legislators etc.  Know your candidates, contribute to them and vote.

There is so much credible information out there, and so many outrageous actions by the current administration, that it is all but impossible to keep up – getting a drink from a fire house seems appropriate.

June 13, 2026 Tim Snyder wrote about Ukraine “Sky defense: bringing it home”

June 11, 2026, came a post from Robert Reich whose entirety is a statement by two men who were long time elected representatives at the state and national level.  They articulate the alarm about the present and future of our democracy.  Take the time to read their thoughts, here.   If nothing else, read the last three paragraphs.

For those who wonder about Social Security, June 12 from Robert Reich.  Persons younger than I will not only be the victims of what is happening today, but are the ones who will have to be responsible for the solution.  This is an important post to read.

Paul Krugman: Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme June 12.  As I was adding this link, an e-mail from a friend came in with Krugman’s post.  I wrote the friend as follows: “In a rational world, I could envision an end game, but in the current environment, I’m not sure, except to say that this is a house of cards and at some point we are going to be badly hurt.”  To which he responded: “Indeed,  rebalance one’s retirement portfolio to safer stuff, and right now index funds might not be that.   Otherwise exercises for balance are good for the mind and body.   A nice weekend is upon us, no ungodly heat….enjoy.”

June 12 Joyce Vance About Youth Voting

June 12 Status Kuo on the USPS as a chokepoint in the upcoming election.

June 12 The Kennedy Center and other Heather Cox Richardson

June 6, I did a related post: “Happy Man“.

And this is Pride Month, and June 9 the Weekly Sift is worth your time.

COMMENTS (more below):

from Joyce: I have long opposed term limits for the reasons Sturdevant expresses; we have term limits already, in the form of elections. What I would change is the way wealth is able to affect elections.

response from Dick: I agree.  It is a difficult issue. Where citizens are ’taught’ to despise the very government they ALL depend on; even worse now with the available methods of destroying lives.

from Brian re Drones: Ah yes drones.  I love flying my little drone all over, for example: [here, Memphis, three years ago]

from Chuck: Here‘s a link that woke me up.

response from Dick: Thank you.  I watched and added it.  Thoughts:  it reminded me of the film I saw in about 2016, “Eye in the sky”.  If you can access it, I’d recommend it.  In order to do mass chaos ((the planeload of individualized drones) requires human manufacture, and coordination at many levels to pull off.  It is theoretically possible, but it would be a huge stretch actually pull it off, and deal with the consequences of the aftermath.

reply from Chuck:  Around 1984 I worked with a guy who made drones.  Amazing what could be done with them then…

Now?  Your assessment understates their capacity given AI and when AGI comes…

Already bioweapons and medical cures can be targeted at specific gene profiles…

Prepare for chaos.

response from Dick: I accept your opinion but don’t share your apparent conclusions. Anything is possible, granted.  But the more hands (minds) get in the mix, from the very beginning of the process, the more likely there is a catastrophic mistake against the perpetrator.  What good is it, for instance, to wipe out the enemy whoever that is.  The Nazis almost succeeded….  At any rate, I’m just offering this for thinking.  I’ll likely add both your opinion and my two in the likely event that at least one more person is interested!  Thanks for feeding in and being part of the conversation.  How do you propose to solve this, given the current state of affairs?

from Carlo: I HAD A DRONE HOVER OVER MY YARD FOR ABOUT 10 OR 15 MINUTES THE OTHER WEEK.

About a month from now is the Fourth of July, the bicentennial of our country.  I am engaged as always, but probably will only rarely post between now and July 4, and not send notice as usual – the absence is intentional.  I do ask you take some time to take a closer and reflective look at this post sometime this month.

The ‘vaation’ gives more time for myself, and any reader, to consider for themselves how each of us fits into the uncertain future that faces us as a nation – a future that we will own by our own individual and collective action or inaction..

I welcome commentaries from anyone about this topic, and will post them if the writer wishes.

If you’re looking for a great starting place, Heather Cox Richardson has organized short videos for the next 250 days.  They’re titled 250 in 250.  Here is subscriber information.  You can subscribe easily.  Check it out.  Each of these will be one minute in length and very well done.

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The official U.S. website for our 250th is America250, from the bipartisan organization  established in 2016.  This website has the official background.  What we will mostly hear about this month is an apparent alternative.  This commentary from Robert Reich today is well worth your time to read.  There will be many other learning opportunities in coming days.

Following are some maps to help organize your own thoughts.  Below is the U.S. basic map for reference .  Here’s the same map in pdf: US Map

Here’s a map history of what became the United States from my 1988 edition of the National Geographic Centennial Atlas of American History: Historical US NatGeo1988001.  Included are seven maps from 1775-1960.

From the same source, here are maps for 1750 and 1763 Historical U.S. Map 1750 1763.

In effect, what was to be a celebration is being turned into a battleground for our future.  Learn

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Miscellany:

Here are several comments about my Memorial Day post about Amable Guion.

My friend, SAK, comments from across the pond.

Here are three commentaries about Cuba by visitors in 2009 and 2012.  The photos are thanks to Brian Gately from a 2009 visit.

More about the Kindness Project, here.

One more time: I find most invaluable several commentators on substack, all of whom speak from experience and I find trustworthy.  I also subscribe to them, supporting their work with very reasonable expense.  They are, again: Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Tim Snyder, Mary Trump, Garrison Keillor.  There are others as well, on occasion, but these are the standouts.

Here’s my 80th birthday blog from May 4, 2020.  (The kid with the baseball, my grandson, is now an engineer.. He was born less than a year after 9-11-01, and graduated from high school in the middle of the Covid pandemic in June, 2020….)

Stay involved.  Our future as a country is very much at stake.

Today is Memorial Day.  My family, like many ordinary families, has a long history of service to the nation, and I remember everyone who is or has served our nation, not only in the military.

Today I recognize this Memorial Day in two ways, both somewhat ‘spur of the moment’, and perhaps a bit different than what is usually seen as normal.

Today’s (May 24) Heather Cox Richardson has an announcement of particular historical interest

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The first recognition:  I title this post “Kindness” thanks to about five minutes  on a recent CBS Evening News segment about  a visit to an elementary classroom about 40 miles down the Mississippi River from where I type, in Red Wing MN.  Hopefully the segment is still on line.  Here is the link.  Again, take the five minutes….  It will speak for itself.

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The second recognition relates to a person I’d never heard of til recently, who happens to be a distant part of my family tree.  He is Amable Guion.  He “died in combat on May 26, 1780, during the Battle of Fort San Carlos (a British and Native American attack on St. Louis)”.  This is a family history deal, about an event in America’s revolutionary period, and if you’re interested in family history, particularly French-Canadian, you’ll likely be interested in this.

First, the summary.

In the summer of 1980 I first became interested in the history of my Dad’s French-Canadian, and my mother’s German-American families.  I’m still at it 46 years later, and its a fascinating journey.  The big files are here.  This relates to the French-Canadian ‘side’, and relates to the ‘war’, largely between the native peoples, and the Spanish, French and English interests in North America.

For the U.S., 250 years ago, 1776, was the Declaration of Independence.  Thirteen years earlier, in 1763, the French and Indian War was settled by the Treaty of Paris, which essentially carved up the to-be United States into two huge pieces, one England, the other Spain.  Of course there were natives too, but not in the real estate business.  (Most of my story is in the links following the text.)

How Amable Guion fits into the story.

About 35 years ago my Dad and I were visiting the Gateway Arch area in St. Louis, and I came across a new book, “St. Louis: A Concise History” by William Barnaby Faherty, S.J.  At the beginning of the book, on page 5, was a sentence that drew me in: in February 1764 “Mrs. Margaret Blondeau Guion, presumably the first woman to come to St. Louis, crossed the river from Cahokia in late May to join her husband Amable who had signed up with Laclede”,

This intrigued me greatly, as an ancestor of mine who came to what is now the Minneapolis area in 1854, was Simon Blondeau, my great-great grandfather, who purchased land on the Mississippi River at Dayton MN.  My cousin, Remi Roy, documented that Marguerite Blondeau Guion and Simon Blondeau were from the same Blondeau line, two or three generations removed from each other.

So, a relative was around at the very beginning of St. Louis MO.  Neat.  I shared this at my grandsons wedding in March of this year.

I knew nothing at all about about Amable Guion .  In the last month or so, looking at another e-mail from cousin Remi, I noticed the name “Guyon” among my Collette family ancestors in Quebec.  More correspondence with Remi, and indeed Amable Guion was in another of my ancestral lines.  His bio is also linked below.

Finally comes the connection with War.

In the 1763 Treaty of Paris, England essentially got what is now the United States east of the Mississippi, including French outposts among which was Fort de Chartres, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi a few miles north of present day Ste Genevieve MO.  Spain got the area west of the Mississippi,  France was no longer a player, having been defeated by England at Quebec in 1759.  So, in 1763 the French-Canadians were in English lands, and in 1764 Amable and Marguerite and others moved across into Spanish territory, which was to become present day St. Louis.

The few French who came across the river in 1764 apparently lived freely until 1780, when Amable was killed, as described in the below link.  Marguerite remarried five months later, and lived on until her 90s, becoming known as one of St. Louis’ original settlers.

(In 1802, Napoleon purchased from Spain what a short while later became the Louisiana purchase.  (see the link “Louisiana” below.).  In 1804 the slaves in Haiti declared their independence from France.  Napoleon unloaded Louisiana to the U.S. (the “Louisiana Purchase”) not long after he acquired it, and  not long after came the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the rest is history.)

If you wish, take a quick trip through the links, and you may find something of interest, as I did.

Guion Amable history

Marguerite Blondeau history

Historical U.S. Map 1750 1763 – National Geographic map 1988 adapted by Dick

Historical US NatGeo1988001 – National Geographic maps 1775-1890

Louisiana – Council on Foreign Relations April 30, 2026

Blondeau as part of my personal family tree (pages 34-47 and 72-81)

Marguerite Blondeau Guion (about 1820 in St. Louis MO) In the Smithsonian Collection.

COMMENTS: 

from Dick: Personally, I attended the local Memorial Day at Woodbury City Hall Veteran Memorial.  It was well done, like all such observances, recognizing service.  It was well attended.  Here’s two snapshots:

Memorial Day Woodbury May 25, 2026

from Dave: Thanks for the “thoughts” today Dick. Your family has an amazing history. I was able to find you through a French website. Hope all is semi-well. My oldest daughter just visited Hawaii and spent several days at Pearl with her husband. They know the story of Max and Petey. What Kash Patel did was sacrilege. I’m trying kindness, but it’s not easy these days.

from Fred: Always a fan of early American history, particularly in the ‘west’ and ‘northwest’ and even when those regions were really not a part of America. Thankfully Manifest Destiny prevailed and the US has the contiguous 48 states, Hawaii, Alaska, Pacific holding, Caribbean presence, Greenland and Canada!

response from Dick: I just did an update on earlier post on Cuba.  This one includes recollections of three folks who actually were visitors to Cuba a few years ago.

from Jeff: Interesting family history in the Cahokia/St Louis area for sure.

from Jeff (2):  quite interesting….what a tangled mess the Revolutionary War was in some ways….British  and Natives (including 200 Dakota Sioux from Minnesota, and Ojibwe from Michigan both tribes of course bitter enemies! ) fighting Frenchies, Americans and Spaniards in St Louis……your ancestor was amongst the 70 to 100 casualities on the St Louis side, the Brits and their native allies lost only 4 fighters!  Here’s article about the battle. [from Dick] The link is brief, yet quite an informative look at the revolutionary days situation in what is sometimes called the corridor of the Mississippi and Missouri River Valleys.  The mid-continent and west (see Lois’ comment below) doesn’t get nearly the attention as the east in revolutionary war days.  History is much more than a soundbite or photo.

POSTNOTE

Napoleon Bonaparte.

I am not an academic, but often, for me, ‘curiosity kills the cat’, and one factoid leads to another and another….  So it went with the lives of Marguerite Blondeau and Amable Guion, both in my French-Canadian ancestral soup, both who appeared unexpectedly on my horizon.

Then came Napoleon, who we’ve all heard of, but in my case only bits and pieces over the years.

Most recently, Napoleon surfaced in the Arc de Triomphe, which I featured in a recent post (photo below) and which is obviously the model for the proposed (and terribly ill-advised) Arch in Washington DC.

Cover of 1920 pictorial history of WWI, Leslie-Judge New York 1920 edition.

I looked up the Paris Arch, and it was commissioned in 1804 by Napoleon about the time he had proclaimed himself emperor of France.  By the time it was finished, Napoleon was long gone from the scene.

Napoleon most definitely had street creds as a war-maker.  At home I have an 1899 book, “Famous and Decisive Battles of the World” by Brig General Charles King writing about 52 decisive battles (his assessment) of the world over 2500 years.  Keep in mind that this was an 1899 perspective

Five of these battles were Napoleon’s, four won by Napoleon in 1800 (Marengo), Austerlitz (1805),  Jena and Auerstadt (1806), the fifth lost at Waterloo (1815).  (In the same list were Bunker Hill (1775) and Saratoga in (1777), and some others in the fledgling US before 1900: The Alamo (1835), Chapultepec (1847) (See Lois Young comment below and Chapultepec), Malvern Hill (1862), Manassas (1862), Chancelloersville (1862), Gettysburg (1863), Nashville (1864), Five Forks and Lee’s Surrender (1865).  And the last of the 52, Santiago Cuba (1898).  Note: Lois also sent on the funeral oration at the time of her relative, Ira Tunison’s, death

Arguments might abound over which should be removed from King’s list, or which, added.  That is not my task.  I comment on them here because nearly 10% of the significant battles, according to the author, an American, were Napoleon Bonapartes.

Without going into detail, what struck me with my little project about Amable Guion, was the role of Napoleon and France in early U.S. history…his purchase of an immense part of the Spanish territory in the early 1800s, then his sale of the same territory to the new United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.  Best I can tell, this was not a gratuitous gift to the U.S.  Not in the least.  In 1804, slaves in Haiti revolted and won, thowing out their French overseers, and France lost is most valuable new world possession.  This doubtless played into Napoleon’s decision to sell; the cost to protect his N. American real estate exceeded the expected benefits.  The rest is history, including the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the former French and Spanish territory of the west.  So life goes.

The above words are just scraps of history.  Feel free to fill in the picture for yourself.